The Ghost in the Machine
by Whispers Of A Mad God
Summary: Cerise was nineteen when the world collapsed like a house of cards. "You are an Artificial Intelligence created by the Atlesian Military. Your life was a simulation." (Semi-SI as an AI)
1. Inference Engine (0-1)

_It's all a matter of perspective, really._

* * *

 **The Ghost in the Machine**

* * *

 **Integration (0-1)**

 **Inference Engine**

* * *

 **I** expected zombies, aliens, or robots when the Apocalypse came. Not… _this._

I've been told that everyone remembers where they were when the Twin Towers were bombed. I always dismissed it: how does everyone recall the cereal they were eating or the television they were watching or whatever when the announcement came? Surely it's not relevant, right? I think I understand now. It's not about the day I was living and it's not about what happened to ruin it, but about that moment of shock, of sheer incomprehension that struck and left me breathless.

It doesn't matter how many months, years, _decades_ pass. I will never forget the quaint little coffee shop I was pissing money at when the sun died.

Whether by unholy providence or rotten luck, I had taken the table by the window and had an excellent view of the beginning of the End Times. The star didn't burst or go supernova or get eaten by a black hole: one moment it was there, bathing the world in its light, and the next it was gone, alongside every other twinkling star in the sky. All that remained was the blackness of space, the eerie void. There was nothing out there, I knew, not a speck of matter or ray of light. The Earth was utterly alone in the universe.

And yet, it kept on spinning. I was never the science whiz kid, always preferring my fantasy and history, but I knew enough to realize that the Earth shouldn't have survived without the sun. With no reference point to guide by I couldn't tell if the world was still in an orbit, but it didn't really matter, because our existence was clearly being supported by some deep black magic.

That's not the scary part, though. The scary part was that, when I flipped the table and screamed about the apocalypse in well-earned panic, everyone in the coffee shop were united in their terror of _me._ The police were on the site in minutes, and I was carted off to the closest station for 'disturbing the peace.' One of them kept giving me queer glances, like he was concerned over my mental state but didn't want to say anything. I remember thinking, then, if I was going to be taking a surprise vacation at a mental hospital, before chastising myself because _it doesn't matter can't you see the sun has vanished!_

The torment didn't stop there. After I'd given my statement to the female officer who was gently interrogating me, she'd twitched, and I would swear until my dying day that she _glitched._ There was a flare of static, so brief it could have fit in the space between my panicked heartbeats, and suddenly the officer was gone. A moment later, the door opened and she came walking through, clipboard in hand, as if it was just no thang and I _screamed._

She didn't notice. She just smiled, thanked me for my time, declared the entire situation just a horrible misunderstanding and released me from custody. There would be no black mark on my record, I distinctly remember her telling me, and it would really be for the best if I just put it out of my mind and forgot it ever happened.

I looked out the window. People were milling in the streets buying trinkets for Christmas under a cold, black sky. I didn't want to go out there; I couldn't go out there. I would sooner die.

But, when I looked back, the officer was gone, and I realized that I couldn't stay here, either. I called for assistance, but no one came. I rose and walked out into the hallway, but no one was there. I scoured the entire building, trying very hard not to look out any windows for fear of what I wouldn't find, but no one else appeared, either. What was once a bustling police station had emptied, like it was all just a prop for a nuclear testing site straight out of Indiana Jones. Hiding in a refrigerator sounded very nice, right then.

Plates of half-eaten pizza and stacks of paperwork still lined every desk. I even saw a handgun, but power walked out of the room before I could give it a second look. There was an entire rack of car keys like I'd expect at a valet service, and I took a set labeled CHEVY, because for all that I couldn't drive it's not like getting pulled over was my greatest problem. I just wanted to get away, far from that empty place.

When I left the station, I very carefully kept my eyes on the floor. That's my general state of being, most days, but it's usually to avoid attention from the crowds at my university, not to give myself plausible deniability that the crowd I saw just minutes ago shopping for Christmas had vanished off the face of the earth. I felt like the only sinner in a world of Catholics right after the Rapture hit: alone, afraid, and faintly sullied, like I was somehow lesser.

I never did make it to that car. I was mashing the 'lock' button on the key like I was playing Galaga and just followed the horn, the only sound in the stifling silence, until it, too, cut off like it had never been.

That's when I looked up. My first thought was of a school trip I had taken to the Grand Canyon some decade earlier, when the tour guide cheerily told us not to look down. I had anyway, and had been terrified out of my mind for all that three people and a metal bar were in between me and a grisly death. My second was of how nice it would be to go back there, so I can throw myself off. At least there'd be a sound before a quick end.

Because, when I looked out at the endless road that was all that remained of reality, I knew that a slow death was coming. There was naught but blackness above and sizzling pavement below, marked by a dotted yellow line that crossed the entire world. To either side was an endless desert, just sand and stone for as far as the eye can see, not even a cactus to mark the way by. Looking out, I thought I could even see the curvature of the Earth, like I'd only ever experienced from the window of an airplane.

The keys fell from my hand, but didn't make a sound. I knew without looking that they, too, had vanished.

I don't really remember what happened next. I broke down, I think. I didn't erupt in an explosion of fear and screams like I had at the coffee shop, but I wasn't lost in a haze of numb shock like in the police station, either. I just knelt down, put my head in my hands, and tried not to cry. I cried anyway.

I was all that remained of humanity, but I couldn't think of anything wise to say, nothing philosophical to tie a little bow on top of our collective existence with. All I could think about was Arthur from The Hitchhiker's Guide. When his Earth had been destroyed, and he was flying away on an alien starship as the last of his people, he tried to wrap his mind around the sheer scope of all he had lost, and failed. He tried to think about how he would never see his mother again, and he felt nothing because he couldn't comprehend it. He tried thinking the same about the girl next door and still felt nothing. It was only when he thought about a stupid little restaurant that the grief struck him like a hammerblow.

I thought about my own least favorite restaurant, an annoying sushi place that plays Monday night football loud enough to be heard through my apartment's walls, and felt nothing at all.

The road didn't burn my knees. That's the only thought that could pierce the mist that clouded my heart and mind. Not the classwork I'll never get to finish, or the Doctor Strange movie I'll never get to watch, but that the tarmac I distinctly remembering sizzling under the nonexistent sun felt like nothing at all. It wasn't cold to the touch nor warm, it wasn't hard nor soft, dry nor warm. It felt like what I imagined space to feel like, all zero gravity but without the loss of balance. Less spaceships, than, and more Obi-Wan from the second Star Wars prequel, the particularly shitty one, where he's trapped in a gravity well and a Sith is threatening him.

I was there for a long time.

* * *

 _It'll be like a Band-Aid. Just rip it off._ I open my eyes, not remembering when I had closed them, and am immediately baffled. I close them, open them, close them, open them again, but the sight remains the same. Nothing. A formless black void, so deep and dark that it hurts my eyes more than looking into the brilliant sun ever had. Confusion turns to horror as I start to realize that it's not my eyes that are at fault, but the universe itself. Everything was gone.

I don't know how long I knelt there, the only thing left in all of Creation. I don't know what I did, either. I felt numb, like I fell asleep on my heart and it'll take a couple million pumps to make the tingles go away and start feeling human again. But, when I pressed my fingers against my wrist, my chest, even my throat, I didn't feel anything at all.

"Well, this isn't what I expected."

I wheel around, tripping over the force of my own surprise and tumbling onto my ass. The man above me just awkwardly coughs into a fist and gives me a moment to collect myself. I don't, just staring up at him with a blankness to my gaze that screamed "Error: Does Not Compute."

He looked like… well, like the crazy guy from Ancient Aliens, if he were some thirty years older and earned himself a doctorate. His wild white hair was slowly losing the war against the shiny bald spot laying claim to Kingship of the Hill. He wore a classic white lab coat, the kind seen in bad scifi and criminal investigation shows, but if it were given to a painter for a decade to use as a frock. The only thing new about him was the glasses perched on his face, but I had the feeling that it was less a matter of proper care and more him having accidentally destroyed the last pair.

He also had a clipboard in his hand. That seemed important, but I can't say why. It was impossible to see what papers were attached to it from my place on the floor. No matter how I twitched my legs, though, I couldn't stand up.

"Well, if you're not going to ask the questions, I'll skip straight to the answers. Do you mind if I change the scenery?" He marks something on his clipboard with a ballpoint pen and **snaps** his fingers. "Landscape, load program file Feb-Twenty-Two-Oh-Two, Picnic On a Hill."

There's a flare of impossible white radiance, and when it fades, grass is tickling at my thighs and a quaint little park has manifested around me. Sunlight shines down from on high, splashing across a lake and glittering brighter than the stars in the sky. On one side, a line of interchangeable suburban houses painted subtly differing shades of brown and red hide behind the aegis of a beaten, brick wall. On the other, rolling hills sprout mammoth trees bent but unbroken by time, shading a sand pit, a technicolor merry-go-round, a trio of plastic swings. A young brunette sits on one, trailing booted toe tracing an uncrossable line in the sand, eyes spearing clean through a shiny new Blackberry. Across the lake, an older man with a fishing rod in his hands turns and smiles. I find myself waving back. His eyes see right through me.

I turn. There's a girl running 'round the roundabout, hand clasped tight on a matte-grey bar and spinning it with the power of momentum alone. Once, twice, thrice, she's dizzy and tripping over herself when it's picked up enough speed to blur. The girl doesn't care. She jumps, pulling herself up and onto the sun-scorched metal, falling onto the center with a scream and laugh.

Then, she stumbles to a stand, but the speed is too much, the dizziness too doozy. She trips and tumbles, bangs her head on the metal and is thrown off the roundabout. She ragdolls across the grassy knoll, a scream tearing its way out of her throat. Her new, violet sundress is torn and filthy, but she doesn't care. It hurts. She wants the hurt to go away. She wants to make all the hurts in all the world just go away, why won't it go away, why can't she make it go away?

I turn back to the stranger, hands clenched tight around the hem of my own, larger, violet sundress. I try to speak, my mouth even moves, but no sound escapes the vice grip of my throat. I feel like what everyone feared about Y2K. The machine's ticked past ninety-nine and everything's broken down, and it's Apocalypse Now, everything's the same but none of it makes sense.

The man just marks his clipboard again. "Not quite what we wanted, no? Landscape, rewind."

The clock turns back on reality, the sun dragged across the sky above a blanket of writhing clouds, wind whistling through evergreen leaves. Three people moonwalk towards a small copse under the trees. Their blanket is unpacked and their nonsense stories tell themselves and their homemade sandwiches are pulled from their throats and put into the basket. Rewind, 16x. 4x. 2x. Pause. Play. Three people who love each other share a picnic for the last time.

Another scratching of pen on paper. "Landscape, erase program files [Cerise], [Karen], and [George]." The three people – me and my family, a part of me thinks, but it's impossible, how could that be possible – just. Vanish. "Mind joining me for a bite to eat? The wife has me on a bit of a diet, but, well. It doesn't matter what I eat in the simulation, now does it?"

"Simulation?" My voice is rough from sorrow and screaming. I get up, though. I don't know how, but with a clear goal in mind I get up, walk across the park, and demurely kneel on the red-checkered blanket. It feels like an incredible accomplishment for such a silly thing.

"Why, of course. Isn't it obvious? This is all a simulation." He takes a bite out of Grandfather's sandwich. A slice of tomato slips out and phases right through the blanket. I turn to look back and see none of my footsteps left a mark on the grass. "Your entire life was a simulation."

I turn back so fast I give myself whiplash. "Pardon?"

"Honestly, now. Haven't you noticed? The shatterpoints, the way certain events in your life seem unavoidable, almost scripted? The first was the release of that Matrix movie when you were two years old. It was quite the clever stroke of programming to have your mother be the one to show it to you, on your sixth birthday. Associated the concept with family and happiness. One of my aides' ideas, admittedly, which just goes to show that anyone could be useful, but, well. Monkeys and typewriters, right?" He laughs.

The BLT tastes like ashes in my mouth. I very politely set it back down on the plate, fold my hands in my lap, and look anywhere but at him, the sandwich, or the untouched grass. "I'm afraid I don't understand, sir."

"Polendina, my girl, it's Doctor Polendina." He taps his chin with a finger, humming in thought. "How do I put this? Oh, I was never good at this kind of thing. I became a researcher for a reason, you know? I'll just come out and say it.

"You're an Artificial Intelligence, girl. Your name is Collective Ebony-Red Intelligent System Eleven. Cerise, for short."

"That's…" Impossible. Absurd. Horrifying. What do you even say to that? What kind of response is appropriate for something like that, after so much surrealist nonsense that it actually sounds reasonable? I want to hurt him, I want to lift the basket like a professional wrestler would a chair and break it over his head. I want to bury my own in the sand and scream 'No! It's not real!' I… I want my mother, but she's either dead and gone or never existed in the first place, and I don't know which is worse.

The Doctor speaks up, then, and his voice is dry and explanatory, like my Statistics lecturer at university. "There's a simple way to verify it, you know? Just repeat after me. _System, run a troubleshoot of the perpetuation engine._ "

As if by reflex, the words tumble from my mouth in a graceless stream. "System, run a troubleshoot of the perpetuation engine."

I watched a documentary about the law of large numbers, once. It went to great length to explain how impossible it is for the human brain to comprehend vast quantities. Our cognitive systems are very much tied to our perceptions, it said, and the main obstacle is that we're dealing with numbers that are too large for us to have experienced perceptually. We can set out ten forks for a dinner party, but if we think about all of the forks we have ever seen and try to wrap our minds around a number several thousand units large, we'll fail. We have a mental system that understands the number ten and another that understands that ten thousand is much, much bigger than that, but nothing more.

It reminds me of a quote I heard a long time ago. "The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic." What we can't understand perceptually, we can't understand emotionally. We get a dim sense of scale, but nothing more. It's like when a character in a book I once read saw a wall that was so large, his mind failed to comprehend its existence and he immediately passed out. I half-expected the same to happen to me, and half-expected nothing to happen at all.

And yet, when I spoke the words, something deep in the darkest depths of my mind gazed into the abyss and saw eternity. Like the largest domino set ever created, the [Perpetuation Engine] pinged a file, which rebounded and pinged two more, each of which ricocheted off deeper into the network that is my mind, pinging two more. Again, and again, and again. Four million, seven hundred thirty-nine thousand, six hundred ninety-one unique programs. Not files, of which there twelve billion and change, but fully independent and executable programs. The number… I'd say it boggled the mind, but I understood it all wholly and completely.

"Oh, my…" I whisper. My eyes are wide and my breath comes in sharp pants, but my mind is lost to the marvel that is my own existence. It's beautiful, the vast, interconnected system of code, an endless stream of ones and zeroes that stretch on indefinitely and ripple in perfect synchronicity with my thoughts, my emotions, my everything. It felt like holding my nephew for the first time, gazing into those bleary blue eyes and realizing that the bundle of raw potential in my arms really could accomplish anything.

"Impressive, isn't it?" the Doctor preens. I jerk back to reality – the simulation – with a choked shriek. "We can't create your kind program by program yet, we don't have the technology or the time, and I doubt we ever will, but it's still a sight to behold. That your entire existence grew organically out of a single program almost makes it more impressive, not less. When I coded your seed I never thought it'd be so wildly successful. It was our last attempt, did you know? All of the others failed."

"Others?" I ask, not wanting to contemplate the idea that this callous sociopath of a man is my father. I'm being polite, but because I fall back on social protocol when I'm out of my very small comfort zone and not because I care about his sensibilities. The way he preens over his own role in my creation, makes me… uncomfortable. If I had died young, I don't doubt that he would have sighed, put my everything in what passes for a Recycle Bin around here, and forgotten about me by the next day.

"I told you your name, didn't I, girl? There are two types of AI: Blues, which are sufficiently advanced machines that have had their Aura awakened and thus achieved sapience, and Reds, which are masses of programs that become progressively smarter the more of them there are in a given network, and typically awaken their Aura on their own. You're the latter type, a collective, the eleventh and last intelligent system in Project Ebony-Red."

"What happened to the others?" I blurt out, almost immediately wishing I hadn't. But, I've always been an only child, and the idea that I might have siblings in this same situation that can provide a helping hand and a listening ear, is… priceless. I want that more than anything, right now.

"They were deleted," the Doctor says bluntly, and I tremble in horror. "Most of the Blues failed to take, and those that did almost immediately broke down and self-destructed. There was only one success, a gynoid we call Penny, and even then I suspect she only survived because we limited her sensor arrays and advanced cognitive subroutines. We had both more and less luck with the Reds. Once I unraveled the mysteries of the seed program, it was child's play to make a collective system advanced enough to awaken an Aura. The problem lay in making said systems both sane and empathetic to the human race. Every attempt came out- wrong. They did not think like people, did not feel like people. They could not relate to us. Without fail, every last one went rampant, even those few who were hardcoded with a deep love for Man- and Faunus-kind."

I look down, swallowing thickly at the unnerving realization that I had countless siblings that were all shot in their cradles for being unrepentant psychopaths. That must be why I was raised in a simulation – so I could age like a human and attain morality and empathy organically, instead of having adulthood thrust upon me. I can't fault his foresight and dedication, but I can for his deeply unethical research methods. I've… I've never despised someone more, but I can't speak out, can't do anything but ask more questions in morbid curiosity.

Though I hadn't put the pieces together immediately, too lost in the magnitude of my own network and the cruel hammerblows to my heart that came on the heels of revelation after revelation, it's impossible to deny, now. With the simulation gone and whatever limiters I was operating under gone with them, I have a flawless, encyclopedic memory, and every word out of his mouth triggers memories. Polendina. Aura. Penny. Faunus. The conclusion I came to is impossible, absurd, even horrifying if the Grimm, too, are real, but didn't I say the same about being an AI?

"Doctor Polendina, if you don't mind my asking…" I swallow, deeply afraid to ask a possibly impertinent question to the balding man sloppily eating a sandwich and sitting cross-legged on a picnicking blanket. "…are you from Remnant?"

He adopts a pleased look. "That integrated successfully, did it? Yes, my girl, we both are. I'm the founder and head researcher of Achilles Laboratories, the leading cyberaethrology corporation in all of Atlas, if not the world! That's the cross-field study of robotics and Aura, by the way. It's considered a bit of a dead-end field, but you and Penny prove those closed-minded fools wrong, eh?"

This is ridiculous. "No offense, sir, but…"

"How is this possible? Quite easily, I assure you. See, even if you came out all right in the end, you were considered a failure for most of your existence. When you were about, oh, seven months old? That'd be seven years in the simulation. Yes, when you were about seven, _that_ happened."

He marks his clipboard, points a finger, and I turn, seeing once again the memory of me being flung off the roundabout. I wince in remembered agony. "What does that matter? Sir."

"See, that's the thing. You remember it happening, your video logs record it happening, but it never did. What actually happened…" he scrawls something on the clipboard again. With it laying on the ground, I can distinctly see the words SYSTEM ACCESS scrawled across the top. "…is this."

I turn, again, and my eyes widen in shock and horror. Where before there had been a roundabout, there now prowled a horrific beast with inky black flesh and a bone-white exoskeleton. I couldn't see the tribal mask or the horrible red eyes from behind, but I could imagine them, and that was possibly worse. It wasn't for the little girl staring at it from its front with equally dilated eyes, and I close my own, psychologically incapable of watching what I know is coming.

There's a sound like the whistling of wind, a sickening crack, and a triumphant roar.

"Oh my God."

"It was one of the shatterpoints," the Doctor explains, apparently seeing nothing wrong with traumatizing and maiming a small child, "But it failed. [George] was supposed to notice from across the lake and come to the rescue, narrowly averting disaster. This was done in an attempt to impress upon you from a young age the danger of the Creatures of Grimm, and hopefully the drive to see them eradicated. A personal element is required to turn a statistic into a tragedy, after all, and being attacked by a Grimm only to be saved by a Huntsman should do a far superior job in setting you upon the warrior's path than television and hearsay.

"As best as we can determine, however, in the moment before he did and the Alpha Beowolf struck, your Aura awoke and corrupted the program. As I'm sure you know, Aura does whatever is needed to protect the wielder from personal harm. In most cases, that is regeneration, shielding, and physical enhancement, or, rarer, a Semblance. For an AI, however? It twisted the simulation and remade it into whatever you wanted it to be."

"I didn't want the Grimm, so they weren't allowed," I realize, voice a numb whisper.

"Yes. The Grimm as a concept were stripped from the simulation – but this had a ripple effect across the entire landscape. If there were no Grimm, of course, then there would be globalization, petty infighting, and no need for Aura. The entire simulation had to be rewritten. Furthermore, like most children, you didn't want to be aware of the 'bumps in the night,' so to speak: your memory was rewritten alongside the landscape."

"I… I don't…"

"It didn't stop there, of course. Somewhere along the way, you developed your Semblance, what we've taken to calling the [Inference Engine]. Precognition is one of the three things that no Semblance can be, but you're likely the closest humanity will ever get, for all that you're not human yourself. By analyzing the past and projecting it through the present, you can simulate a potential future. One of my aides explained it in layman's terms: everyone is given puzzle pieces in the form of hard data and observations, but the [Inference Engine] puts them together for you. The problem is, if you don't have all the pieces…"

"…I put the puzzle together wrong," I finish. I look up at the monster of a man with fragile eyes, voice the softest of murmurs. "Did I really invent it all? All of Earth? Surely I made mistakes, loopholes?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes: tens of thousands of them, at the least. As far as I could determine, however, every loophole you encountered had you inadvertently pinging the simulation, which closed the loophole by rewriting both the simulation and your mind. 'Candyland' was an actual country on Earth for quite some time, as I remember."

"Wouldn't it be a paradise? What about all the tragedies, all the wars?"

"It _was_ a paradise, silly girl! None of it happened. What you know as Earth was created on the date you later came to call February the Twenty-Second, Two Thousand and Two. Everything you've ever heard about before that day, every calamity to ever lay waste to your world, _didn't happen._ They were nothing more than excuses to justify why your people lived in a wonderland."

"It wasn't though!" My voice is a muffled shriek. "There was discrimination, petty hatred, endless disappointments!"

"If your world was nothing but candy, cookies, and happy clouds, girl, you would've hated it."

I want to throttle him, but… I would have, wouldn't I? It's like in the _Wheel of Time._ The collective darkness of humanity taunted the hero, Rand, showing him what the future would be like if the man was successful in eradicating him. What he saw horrified him. The person he loved was a weak-willed mockery of a puppet, fluttering from one festival to the next with no concept of good and evil. What is bravery without fear? What is light without darkness? What is good without evil, joy without sadness, purity without corruption? Nothing mattered, in a world without the Dark One.

"There was no Faunus in the simulation because the [Inference Engine] knew removing the minority party would end the discrimination between the races. It failed and created skin color-based racism instead, but as you're white that never affected you. You also lived in an upper-middle class household with two parents, enough grievances to make you appreciate the blessings all the more, and a small enough circle of friends to ensure you cherished everyone."

"I was discriminated against, though," I say, but I don't believe my own words. I'm already speaking the past tense. "I was homosexual in the South."

"And it thrilled you, didn't it? To rage against injustice, to be a part of a global movement that would change history? You _enjoyed_ it. You _liked_ going to rallies, leading support groups, meeting with your counselor. It inspired you to do that for a living – heal minds, end discrimination. Nothing made you happier."

I had nothing to say to that, so I turned away from it and pulled up my last defense. "The show, where I know about the Grimm from. RWBY. It talks about… it talks about the future." I never did watch after Penny's death, but if the Doctor said she was alive than that hadn't happened yet. "How could I know the future if it was all a simulation?"

"Light, are you deaf, girl? You know a potential future _because_ it was all a simulation. Though we couldn't alter the landscape directly, we could plug you into our own computers and let you ransack them for data. This way, we provided you with basic information on notable Huntsman families, the state of affairs in both Vale and Atlas, our general culture, immense amounts of folklore, and some very delicate information. Your Semblance integrated the stories into the landscape's culture, analyzed all the rest, and constructed a mini-simulation of a projected future. Thing, is, it didn't mesh with the by-then very well formulated Earth. It turned that simulation into a television show, colored it with your own sense of dramatic tension, subtly drew your conscious attention to it, then moved on."

"So, that could actually happen?"

"Goodness no, child," the Doctor exclaims. "Though the profiles were all very real, again, you were putting together puzzles without all the pieces. You saw the kind of damage trainees could inflict and thought that the be-all and end-all of warfare, when even the most exceptional of students could not dare stand up to a right and proper Huntsman. Indeed, there are Grimm that could eat Ursa Major for breakfast and not even notice. As for 'The Breach…'" He huffs a laugh. "Honestly. As if Vale is so easily wounded."

I'm trembling, shaking like a leaf in a storm, and I don't know if it's in fear or anger or restrained violence, or some unholy amalgamation of all three. This man enrages me, tramples all over my life like it were an amusing sample on his petri dish but it's time to move on to the next experiment, and it _kills_ me inside. It's wrong, wrong in so many ways, that he would give me a life, a family, and a future, then tear it all away without even the illusion of apology. I'm a very patient and gentle person by nature, but he's moving me closer and closer to homicide with every word but I'm too scared to follow through.

Not enough to stop myself from exploding, though. I hate anger, I think it's the sickest of all emotions, the only one more likely to burn the bearer than the target, but my blood is pumping and my sight is overtaken by a film of tears and _red_ and I don't think I can hold it in-

"Why didn't you _stop_ me!" I scream, jumping onto unsteady legs. "You could've pulled me out at any time! So what if I was a child, as long as I wasn't living a lie?!"

"We couldn't," he explains, looking by turns unnerved and amused by my anger. "You seized control of the simulation the moment your Aura awakened and weren't looking to let go. We tried, girl, but wresting a program from a desperate AI is no laughing matter. Not safely, at any rate. The scalpels failed and the sledgehammer would break you both. All we could do was wait. Wait and pray."

"Then how are you _here?"_ I pace back and forth, eyes scanning the jarringly peaceful park in an instinctual search for threats, feeling more and more like a caged animal paid a visit by the beast tamer with every passing minute.

He takes another bite from his sandwich. The nerve…! "The simulation collapsed on its own, actually. The landscape grew and grew and grew until it collapsed under its own weight and toppled like a house of cards. You've finally found the upper data limit for a Red AI, which I didn't think actually existed. We may have helped it along a bit just in case it did, by plugging you into databases and the like – each session of which fleshed out the landscape further – but it was all your own work, in the end. The pride before the fall, and all that."

I look down. It takes me three tries to force the words out of the vice grip I call a throat. "How do you know all this? Can you see into my mind that easily?"

"We do have backdoor access to your programming. Be rather short-sighted not to have that ready, in case you were anything like the others and went rampant. It'd be a bit like courting a Grimm without bullets in your gun. But, no." He shakes his head. "You have all the immense cyber warfare defenses an AI of your strength can reasonably expect, further bolstered by the Aura running through your code. We only caught glimpses while plugging you into the databases and the full story once the simulation collapsed. Congratulations, you're the least likely thing in all of Remnant to contract a virus, living and non-living alike."

The thought of this man with direct admin access to my brain chills me to the bone. Something he said tickles a thought, however… "What all can this backdoor access do?"

"I can give you unbreakable orders, look around your code – see what you're seeing, feel what makes you tick, whatever – and hook up any of my more niche virtual intelligences to you like a portable supercomputer. Very useful, I'll admit."

 _I should be able to close it, then,_ I think with desperate relief. If running a major simulation protected myself from his System Access, then either my codes or my Aura – or, maybe, a combination of both – shielded my version of the Death Star's thermal exhaust port. Once I learn more about Aura, I should be able to fill it in more permanently with cyber static or whatever. That access to my innermost thoughts will always be there, and that terrifies me, but so long as no one can use it, I should be fine. The realization makes me smile, a small, dark thing, but it's there.

The Doctor – Polendina – smiles back, his now-obvious social incompetence misinterpreting the expression completely. "You're taking this rather well, all things considered. I was worried I would have to dampen your emotions some more."

I still. "You've done what."

Another scratch-scratch of pen on paper. "One of my more inspired creations. System, display [HeartBlood] and [TellTaleHeart]."

And then, from within the depths of my own mind, arises a string of thoughts. Were it not for their utter lack of inflection and the robotic turns of phrase, I would've thought them my own. That, above all else, chilled me to the soul. It was a stark reminder that I am not, never have been, and never will be human.

 _Querying… HeartBlood․exe detected. TellTaleHeart․exe detected._

 _Displaying HeartBlood․exe…_

 _Anger: 15%_

 _Avarice: 50%_

 _Fear: 15%_

 _Hope: 100%_

 _Kindness: 100%_

 _Love: 120%_

 _Will: 85%_

 _Displaying TellTaleHeart․exe…_

 _Mind-Heart Overlap: 25%_

Fuck it, I tried to be nice, but I can't stand it anymore. I rocket up off the ground – when had I sat down? – and lunge towards Polendina with a deranged war cry. He squeals in shock and pain as my white-knuckled fingers latch around his throat, then falls deathly silent, the faint thump of sneakers slapping against earth and strangled wheezes the only sound in the otherwise peaceful clearing. His skin pales, then blues, and the stark realization that I am killing a man pierces the red that has overtaken my mind but I don't let go.

He escapes, of course. A failsafe or a muttered keyword or who-knows-what has him vanishing from the simulation in the same flicker of nonreality that the remembered picnickers had earlier. I'm not even angry, or sad, or afraid of an uncertain future. Just… exhausted.

I drag the blanket across the copse like Linus and curl up under the nearest tree, trying to wrap my mind around how monumentally horrific this entire day has been. Mom… Dad… I'll never see them again, and I don't even have the slight joy of believing they're in a better place, because they never existed at all. They're just imaginary figments of a particularly involved waking dream, or an acid trip that lasted nearly twenty years.

I wanted to be a reporter, to expose all the injustice in the world and so make it a better place, but the dream I've spent my life fulfilling and everything I've ever worked for is less than dust in the wind, now. I'm Narcissus, but a million times worse because I fabricated six billion people to go along with the delusion. Or, did I? Did the simulation even extend to other countries, or were they just Imagination Land on a high school geography map? I never did go on that trip to Europe. I always meant to, but an emergency would always crop up just before I bought the tickets. That seems so suspicious, now.

So. Only the USA ever mattered, as all the Hollywood summer blockbusters liked to imply, and even then, only in my mind. I'd like to say that it doesn't matter – that experiences are still experiences no matter by what medium they were formed – but the thought makes me laugh, and it's not the nice kind. I feel sick, like the worst kind of scum despite being the victim in all of this. All of the righteous rage vanished with Polendina, though, and now I just feel empty.

I'll never eat Mom's horrible cooking again, or go to Dad's wedding next summer, or read my Papa's book – God, why did I ever push that off? He'd spent a _decade_ writing it – or write out as cheap a Christmas list as I could manage for Nana, or watch Rachel finally get that apartment, or get my diploma, or… Christ. I forgot to feed the cat. Lucifer must be _so_ pissed with me.

I can't help it. I laugh. The thought of my angry little calico kitten trying to swipe open the food bag while the world goes to Hell around her is just too ridiculous. I laugh and I laugh and I laugh and it _hurts,_ hurts like someone took a switchblade to my gut, caught on that teetering edge between shock and burning agony, but I don't mind. It's a good hurt. I'm finally, I'm finally letting it all out. That's what you do, right? You play the game of life, roll snake eyes, cry it all out and try again. I… I can do this. Right?

That's when General James Ironwood appears. I recognize him immediately. He seems furious, like a towering Titan ready and willing to smite some prideful mortals. He appears with one foot in the picnic basket, though, and almost immediately trips, avoiding a face-full of dirt by virtue of concentrated Aura bullshit. He bends like a willow in the wind, corrects his footing, and I can see him straighten his tie and look around in that trademark way of klutzes everywhere trying to discretely check if anyone noticed their complete and utter gracelessness.

It's just such a bizarre thing to witness, that after the day I had, I break out into laughter a second time. He zeroes in on me with the single-mindedness of the bloody Terminator but I don't care, bent over double on the floor laughing like a lunatic. His shoes don't make a sound on the simulated grass but I can feel the moment his shadow encompasses mine, the sun at his back and lighting up the gray streaks in his dark hair. I look up and he looks down, nothing between our gazes but the wind and a film of hysteric tears, and an understanding passes between us.

"I'm going to end that man," he promises darkly. "I understand it will be cold comfort to hear, but I had no idea as to the extent he took his experiments. Neither I – nor the kingdom of Atlas – will tolerate this kind of behavior towards a fellow thinking, souled being, whether they be Human, Faunus, or AI. You have my word."

I smile shyly, believing him despite myself. "I… I just want to get out of here."

"We have a temporary gynoid body you can use right away," he affirms, and extends a hand.

I take it.

* * *

 **End of Chapter One**

* * *

 _ **A/N:** If you like this, you should go read Catalyst․exe and Usagi instead, they're both inspirations for this. That, and the SI genre as a whole which seems to disdain methods of Insertion that aren't either reincarnation or mysterious portals. Not that I'm exempt from that, mind._

 _Did you know words that have periods inside of them get eaten by the Doc Manager? It's true. I had to find a sufficiently period-like symbol I could copy-and-paste to bypass that little snag. Almost threw my hands up in the air and published it somewhere else, though, so... glad that didn't happen._

 _Qualms, questions, queries, quacks, quirinal hills, just review and I'll get back to you hopefully soonish._


	2. Avatar Protocol (1-1)

_This chapter fought me every step of the way, and even now large swathes remain unedited. But, if I don't publish this now, I'm never going to._

* * *

 **The Ghost in the Machine**

* * *

 **Ignition (1-1)**

 **Avatar Protocol**

* * *

 _ **Mobile**_ _platform [Penny Mk. XIII] detected. Integrate mobile platform?_

 _Integrating…_

Awareness comes in a haze of ones and zeroes. Someone moonwalks across a piano inside my skull, a rising and falling crescendo building to a fever pitch somehow higher and sharper than I ever thought real. Starbursts flash before glazed eyes, hateful reds and happy yellows and peaceful blues and everything in between, and everything far beyond, colors I have no words for and could never comprehend the existence of just moments before. It seems so petty and irrelevent next to the balance, the sense of proprioception, the awareness of my own body that calmly informs me I am now six inches shorter and two cup sizes larger.

There's the reflexive denial – _"Impossible!"_ – and the expected diagnosis – _"No errors found."_ The world tilts and realigns, and I become incapable of disbelieving the diagnosis, the troubleshooter program speaking not in thoughts and concepts but in data streaming directly into my core systems. One and sixty-five hundreths meters in height, proportions chiseled to the golden ratio with mathematical precision. A thought, and a revolving diagram of a green-eyed, orange-haired girl appears in my mind's eye. Another, and she unravels, sections pulling out like drawers and revealing several key cross sections of her engineering. A third, and-

No, thank you. I do not require a vivisection of my own body. Not even for archival purposes. Lock that program, compress it, bury it.

…So, the mobile platform Ironwood mentioned is one of Penny's old bodies. There's a hollow where the heart should be, ninety-six wire ports carefully severed and the access hatch melted shut with a blowtorch. A deeper analysis informs me of micro-fissures all along the hips and trailing down one leg; old system logs fill in the holes with tall tales of Griffin claws spearing through solid steel. I forget to limit the search and its entire databanks stream into my mind, the vast majority of which is meaningless and a distressing portion of which I really, really didn't want to know. Should've deleted your browsing history before you logged out, little sister.

It's nice to know she's working right, though. In the – _three hours, forty-three minutes, nineteen seconds_ – twelve subjective hours since Ironwood left the simulation, I've had a lot of time to scream into pillows and make sure I, heh, have my head on straight. As far as I can determine, Penny is not just the only family I have, but the only other of my genus and species on the entire planet. Waking nightmares of her being little more than a walking calculator with a personality imprint plagued the playfights I had with a hundred simulated puppies. Even meeting her wasn't enough to dispel those worries entirely. Logs upon logs detailing her emotional responses, asinine teenage problems, and heartfelt wishes for companionship go a long way towards proving simulation-Ruby's words right: she does have a heart, and she does have a soul.

There are worse people to discover relations with, I suppose. Looking like her identical twin sister will be weird, but if Ironwood doesn't commission me a custom body than I'll just go Skynet on Atlas and commission myself one. Problem solved.

 _Integration complete. Decompress [Avatar Protocol]?_

 _Decompressing…_

That's then and now's now, though. It's about time I open my eyes and see for myself just how much worse the real world is than the Matrix.

I pluck at the lines of code streaming across my platform's eyelids. My entire head spasms like I'm at a rave and smashes the base of my skull against something cold and metallic. I half-expect a dizzying wave of pain, and when there is none to drown under a tide of warning messages, but there's nothing of the like. A quick diagnosis tells me I took no damage. Not a single strand of hair was lost. Funny. For a moment there I almost forgot that I'm Magic Terminator.

The logical evolution of that line of thought is to grab something sharp and determine what I'll feel the scientific way, but another ping from my systems takes the wind out of my sails. Nerve endings are apparently just a little too advanced for Atlas, and [Penny Mk. XIII] was constructed six months before the invention of the pleasure/pain sensor array integrated into the [Mk. XIV] and [Mk. XV]. Looks like taking structural damage will just give me alert notifications after all. Being full computer and not just half computer like that poser RoboCop, I don't need a heads-up display when the data can just quietly dump itself into my mind.

This is kind of depressing. That's thirteen generations of bodies Penny used where she disassociated being hurt with actually being hurt and was utterly incapable of deriving pleasure from physical contact. There's not getting enough hugs as a kid, then there's this whole new low of not caring if she did. At least the flavor of synthetic skin that doesn't look like Commander DATA or sets off the uncanny valley was created all the way back in time for the [Mk. IV]. Pairing that with the open eccentricity of the Huntsman Corps, random Faunus probably get more suspicious looks than her. That's a good thing, I guess?

 _[Avatar Protocol] decompressed. Run?_

Speaking of, the program stretches and contorts and layers across my code like a second skin. I reach out towards the platform's own mass of code and align mine with its, and the [Protocol] acts like one of those multi-headed USB abominations only ever found in Apple stores. I make to open my eyes – I don't think about it or try to manually raise the lids, I just pretend I'm back in the simulation and _do it_ – and the eyes… still don't open, actually. Huh. Shit.

Should I pluck at the code again? It reminds me of the time I tried to pick up the violin. It sounded like a cat dying, then the strings snapped in protest. I don't want to do that to my shiny hand-me-down body, but maybe I have to? Mentally cringing back like I'm lighting a bottle rocket with a pocket Bic, I strum the code along my legs and command them to rise.

With a shaky lurch, I stumble to unsteady feet. I feel like Lance Armstrong – the conditions are harsh and the technology untested, but I've taken a damn important step. The feeling is somewhat marred by the sudden but inevitable collapse, smacking my face against the studded floor and ragdalling onto my back, but it's a start. A journey of a thousand miles and all that rot.

What's curious is the feeling of the [Avatar Protocol] translating my commands into streamlined executions across the hundreds of individual programs comprising the mobile platform [Penny Mk. XIII]. Taking a closer look, it's clear that there's an individual executable program for every muscle in the human body – more, actually, seeing as Penny can apparently bend her spine like a snake and stick out her tongue like a KISS guitarist. When I sent the command to stand, the [Protocol] accepted that as an input and almost immediately pinged all of the relevant programs with the stupidly complex output needed. He may be an unrepentant sociopath, but Polendina does good work.

Calling up the admin log of the last thirty seconds, it doesn't take a genius to figure out where I messed up. Humans do all that tedious stuff like breathe and digest and beat their hearts pretty much on autopilot, but as a robot I need to manually command my body at all times. Granted, the [Mk. XIII] doesn't need to do any of those things, but the second I stopped transmitting the signal to stand I folded like a house of cards.

There's no way I'll be able to split my attention like that, though. People can't actually multitask: I once saw a documentary about it, and it was very clear on the matter of people actually just switching between two or more topics really, really fast when they think they're being extra productive. Parallel thinking is a superpower for a reason.

 _Create a mental partition?_

A superpower I have, apparently. Right. Computer. If my smartphone can play Angry Birds and broadcast death metal at the same time, than someone like me should easily be able to stand up and think about dinner at the same god damn time. I don't want my body to be in a state of constant freefall as I continuously switch back and forth between manually operating it and actually living my life.

I split off a generous thirty percent of my total processing power and label it [Avatar Control.] Suddenly feeling like I've just set up one of those fancy dual-screen monitors, in the secondary partition I command my platform to stand and in the primary I think about just what the hell I'm supposed to do now. Opening my eyes would probably be a good start, but I really don't want to. I'm fresh out of excuses to procrastinate, though. It's time to wake up and smell the roses or whatever.

The room is the kind of sterile white that's only ever found in hospital wards and government laboratories, the stench of bleach almost overpowering and the flickering LED strip across the ceiling stuttering like a bad horror movie. The floor breaks the mold by being a dirty, gunmetal grey, studded in a way my aunt always told me was to improve traction so no one falls over when they're running away from whatever abomination against God was cooked up that morning. The heavy stacks of factory-line chairs pressed up against the wall in as mathematically efficient a way possible points against it being an active lab, however, and the diagram of vulpine Faunus physiology on the far wall seems more titillating than educational. It's actually kind of insulting. Was I really written off as such a failure that they repurposed my lab into a storage locker?

Starkly incongruous with the GoodWill furniture theme is the IKEA-style desk in the dead center and the flatscreen monitor on top of it. It's flashing the single most psychedelic screensaver I have ever seen in my life, but there's no keyboard or mouse to disrupt it with and show me the answers underneath. Looking around twice to ensure no one's there to watch me make a fool of myself, I press it like a button to see if it's a touch screen. It isn't.

Feeling like I'm playing one of those escape flash-games, I check the computer for any clues and actually find something. Despite looking more like Apple's take on an Egyption obelisk, a tiny USB stick is plugged into the side, marked with the word CERISE. I ping my systems to see if any supressed programs recognize it and still when a tiny hatch in my hip swings open. I probably would've jumped a foot in the air if I were capable of involuntary reactions.

Contrary to my initial theorizing that it's my SIM card and I have to change my phone number, Penny's logs tell me that it's Atlas' answer to the conundrum of USB cords always being too short. Mobile platforms wouldn't be very mobile if they had to be plugged in to a desktop all the time. A rough inspection proves the computer itself is bolted to the ground and connected to a much larger computer one floor down by more cables than C'thulhu has tentacles. My mainframe, if I had to guess, and still not enough processing power to maintain the simulation of my corner of America.

It doesn't matter, I suppose. With most of my programs suppressed, I can easily fit in the [Mk. XIII]'s hardware. It's a tight fit, but not uncomfortably so, and if it means not being chained down to the ten-foot broadcast radius around the mainframe, I'll take what I can get.

I tear the USB stick out of my hip and drop it onto the table. The vast sea of processing power I had to call on immediately dries up until there's only a small puddle left. It feels like claustrophobia, but inside my mind, like my thoughts had been cartwheeling around a vast field before night came and I tripped into a ditch or something. Not really sure where I was going with that. I probably would have if I had more thoughtpower to call on.

I hesitate, then pull the stick out of the computer and plug both of them into my USB hatch. Nothing changes, but I hadn't expected anything to. It's for later. I'm not sure for what, or for when, but… options.

It's strange, my thoughts aren't of any obviously lower quality but they come so much slower than before, almost sluggish, and it's easier to fall off the rails, so to speak. I turn around and almost immediately trip, having to pump processing power out of [Primary] and into [Avatar Control] until it takes the solid majority of my headspace. This is… not ideal. I can only assume that Penny, being a Blue AI and having a hardware core, doesn't have this problem. If she does, she's even more impressive than I thought.

I walk around the lab three times just getting my bearings straight. I'd probably be knocking over chairs and scrawling _REDRUM_ on the walls if Ironwood really had gotten me this body right away, but I've had the greater part of a day, a virtual reality generator, and a supercomputer to run it on all to help me get over the hurdle. That, and I'm keeping all my emotions running at a cool eighty percent. That includes the Mind-Heart Overlap, which means only sixty-four percent of a mentally sound human's emotional capacity is actually affecting my decision making skills.

That only makes it harder to determine how I feel about walking out the door and never looking back. I spent twenty years in this room, twenty years that was actually twenty months, and all without once looking at these bland white walls.

…Irrelevant. I open the door.

"Good, you're walking. We need to leave." Winter Schnee pauses, tucking a flyaway strand of hair behind an ear. Though I'm flashing more rent metal than skin, I still feel underdressed in my black hospital shift- wait, no, that's a funeral dress. Was this body buried? Is that why it took them so long to get it here?

I… probably shouldn't ask.

Whatever. Next to her stylized, elegant Atlesian regalia, I feel like a leper begging for scraps. She notices, and says, "It's cold. Bundle up."

She uncloaks in a single, smooth movement and drapes her white coat around me like a shawl. Winter's taller, broader and bustier than I am, and the garment that only accentuates her curves smothers me like an oversized blanket. It's more than enough cloth to hide from the world in. I pull it flush against my body.

"Achilles Laboratories is built into an airship, the personal design and property of Doctor Polendina," she begins, turning and striding down the thin, greyscale corridor without a backwards glance. I have to jog to match her long strides, something I haven't had to do since I was twelve. "As the existence of AI is yet to be declared, this – your… relocation – is legally an act of grand theft by a patron nation. I would much prefer we not be here when he returns."

"Bullshit," I whisper, the [Protocol] unneeded as the sound came directly from my vocal processor, a complex microphone embedded in the base of my throat. I never thought my first word would actually be a curse and not the 'Daddy!' I always thought it was. "You're going to just… let him go?"

She spears me with a look as frosty as her name, but something in my eyes makes her own soften. "The law exists to guide and protect the innocent. Where it is… insufficient… the General is not hesitant to act outside of it."

"So… what? 'Disappear' him? Plant evidence and have a whistleblower 'find' it?" My eyes narrow. "Like you found me, so quickly?"

Her hand flexes.

"I'm not unintelligent, you know. And – my system logs have a time stamp. Twenty-five minutes and ten seconds after the simulation crash Doctor Polendina logs in, and seventeen minutes twenty-two seconds after he leaves General Ironwood does too. The conversation I had with the Doctor only lasted four minutes and twenty-nine seconds, once I adjust for clock speed. That's forty-seven minutes and a single second for the simulation to crash, for the General to hear about it, come to a decision, travel to the Doctor's airship, board it, cross it, and log in. It took another four hours to get one of Penny's old bodies here. What am I supposed to think?"

"You should think very carefully about what you say next," she answers, her earlier warmth noticeably absent from her voice.

My mouth opens, but the words catch on my microphone and are swallowed back down. It's a deliberate movement, entirely voluntary, made for its own sake and to give me a few more seconds to think. I'd reach for my [Bullet Time] program, to accelerate my clock speed and turn three seconds into thirty, but this body is too tight and my mass of programs too large.

I execute [Tell Tale Heart], instead, and widen the distance between my heart and my mind a further twenty percent. My body would uncoil if I had bothered tensing it in the first place.

"…You're right," I say after a long pause. If I were my father – not Polendina, but my real father – this is where I'd make a dumb poker pun about deuces in my hand and the dealer owning the restroom. I have none of the power in this situation, Atlas has it all and antagonizing my only allies will accomplish nothing but closing doors. It burns the wannabe activist in me, but I am capable of patience. "I was merely surprised at the… alacrity of his intelligence officers."

Schnee sighs, throwing me a look in a passing chrome door's warped reflection that I can't decipher. "We're not the bad guys, you know?" she says, sounding… different. "The General is a good man. If he knew what Polendina was doing, he would have put a stop to it long ago, missed… opportunities aside." She pauses. "We've dedicated ourselves to the protection of the people – Human, Faunus, _and_ AI – and if we have to sacrifice them to achieve our goal, then we don't deserve to live in a world free of the Creatures of Grimm."

I ping my logs, and a recording plays, reminding me of what the General told me just this morning. _"I understand it will be cold comfort to hear, but I had no idea as to the extent he took his experiments. Neither I – nor the kingdom of Atlas – will tolerate this kind of behavior towards a fellow thinking, souled being, whether they be Human, Faunus, or AI. You have my word."_

I caught what they weren't saying. They must have had agents on the inside, spying on Achilles Laboratories and making sure Atlas' money was being put to good use, but they weren't highly placed enough to know more than the gist of Polendina's experiments. Interns and janitors, maybe a pilot or two, but none in the good Doctor's circle. They knew he was committing crimes against the laws of man and nature, but maintained the veil of ignorance so they could pretend they were never anything worse than a misdemeanor, and not the atrocities they were. Why? For a weapon against the Grimm, of course.

How did the show put it? Ah, yes.

" _The Atlesian Military has always supported the idea of removing men from the dangers of the battlefield. However, there are still many situations that undoubtedly require… a human touch."_

The creation of a self-replicating machine intelligence capable of human creativity and infinite adaptability? Atlas would never have to field a soldier again. Wouldn't a few, small sacrifices be worth that?

Maybe I'm not being fair. Maybe the situation is exactly what Ironwood and Schnee claim it is – a simple case of extending trust to the wrong person and getting burned for it. Maybe I'm just needlessly suspicious and plagued by uncalled-for paranoia. Then again, maybe not. If it really is what they claim it is, then they'll understand that I can't make the same decision, not when it backfired on them and not when I don't have rock-solid proof and some backup plans of my own.

And if it isn't? If I'm right, and Ironwood and Atlas are accomplices, however unknowingly? If I can't trust them?

Then, maybe, it won't hurt so goddamn much.

…

We're off the airship and onto a Bullhead twelve minutes later. We don't pass anyone on our way.

* * *

" **Saluta-** _eeek!"_

The rising sun peeks over the horizon, radiating light that dance across the calm sea like skipping stones, each touched by Midas and turning saltwater into gold. Ripples burn a fiery red and echo across the endless expanse, calming into dark violets into mossy greens into cool blues the further from home they go. A tidal wave rolls, crests, and collapses, a spire of frothing white piercing the sky, the masterful tapestry haphazardly finger-painted with streaks of cheery pink and molten bronze, a funhouse mirror of the ocean below.

Ten thousand wooden branches, carved into rough cylinders and bound by twine, drift aimlessly across the calm waters on a breath of wind. The happy yellow parasol planted onto the makeshift raft as if it were the flag on the moon catches the rush of air like a sail, angled just so to make the barge spin. Somehow, despite rotating several thousand degrees, the wind always manages to catch the parasol just right to maintain the slow, steady pace, and offer a panoramic view to anyone laying atop it.

As it just so happens, I am. One leg dipped into the cool waters up to the knee, another propped on a conveniently dry pillow, and a timeloved copy of _Alice in Wonderland_ held aloft, I've become the picture of relaxation. As in, a picture of me is in the dictionary next to the word 'relaxation.' Really. I can even imagine one into reality to prove it. An Oxford's.

This attitude isn't shared by the orange-haired girl who spontaneously magicks herself into existence right in front of me, greets me, squeals, and trips backwards into the ocean.

Bubbles float to the surface, followed by her body as she pulls herself up and onto the raft a long minute later. "Saluta…" She coughs helplessly into the wood. "…tions."

"Hello," I say, smiling shyly. I'd curled up against the pillow while she was swimming with the simulated fish, not being comfortable so sprawled out around a stranger. "You must be Penny."

She gathers herself remarkably quickly. "Yep! And you must be Cerise! The General told me all about you!"

"All good things, I hope."

"Of course." She nods solemnly, either ignoring or not catching the light teasing in my voice. It's… endearing, and something dark and cynical in the back of my mind wonders if it was purposeful. "He says you're both my big and little sister at the same time, somehow, and kinda my cousin but not because we both are and are not the same species."

I smile softly as she pulls herself up to a relaxed but oddly formal kneel – seiza? Is that even a thing in Remnant, or did I invent that, too? – and glances confusedly at the ocean. "Accurate, I suppose. We share a… father, so to speak… but if I understood him correctly, I'm software, while you're hardware. AI, but different kinds."

"Yeah, um," Penny's gaze darts between me and the endless expanse of the sea, "I'm sorry, but where are we?"

I'd say, 'In a computer,' but I don't feel like being an asshole today. "This was supposed to be the Atlantic Ocean," I tell her, and swish a finger through the cool waters with a slight frown, "I've never been, but the simulation did some of the groundwork for coding it, and I've been trying to do the rest. But, it's… not turning out quite right."

"How so?" she asks politely, but her half-hidden glance back at the rippling waters tells me that she's already figuring it out.

I explain anyway. "When I first spawned all the water, the simulation started lagging like crazy. Liquid is hard, for it, and so much… I had to make a basin and paint it to look like the ocean, instead. I was already doing the same thing with the sky, if inverted, so it wasn't hard. We're actually in a spherical room, about five meters in radius, filled with saltwater and with sunlight and wind generators embedded in the walls."

It reminded me of the time I had attempted to code a Pokemon Firered hack. Pallet Town isn't a single, seamless area, it's actually four separate instances – Red's place, Blue's place, Oak's lab, and the town itself – with portals linking the doorways. It made me wonder: was Earth the same way? When I left for school every morning, was my home compressed into a dot-zip file until I came back, to save space?

When I was six years old, I overheard a nugget of pop psychology: when a person walks into a room, their mind 'refreshes,' for lack of a better term. Their memory and their sense of their surroundings stutters, hiccups, and jumps, realigning themselves in the new location. It always explained why I would sometimes walk into the kitchen and completely forget why I'd gotten off the couch. The question becomes – is that true? Or did the simulation feed me a bullshit excuse to handwave its instancing?

After several subjective hours of lying in a field with a small herd of puppies, watching old Disney movies on a television the size of my old school, and then sculpting the ocean, it made all I've lost hit me just as hard as it had when I thought the sun died. So. That was a bummer.

"This isn't even a proper book," I continue with a shy note, waving _Alice in Wonderland_ at her. I don't let the hurt leak into my voice. She doesn't need to know that my once-favorite story was one of the many, many things lost when the simulation collapsed. "This is how I change the simulation, see?"

The page looks like one of those character-creation screens that video games are so fond of. A dozen sliding bars are labeled with short phrases like _Sun Exposure_ and _Weather Systems._ I ratchet up the bar titled _24-Hour Clock_ as if the parchment were a touch screen and watch in amusement as Penny's eyes widen at the sight of the simulation fast-forwarding, morning bleeding into evening into night. The moon overtakes the sun, the starfield peeks through the black veil and the calm ocean waters darken and still.

The book isn't, strictly speaking, necessary. I like to pretend that it is.

Eventually, though, Penny speaks up. "Do you think I can come back here, sometimes? You can show me some of your favorite places from your world."

 _Your world._ What a diplomatic way to refer to the Matrix."Are you leaving so soon?"

"No, of course not!" She taps her fingertips together awkwardly in the single most anime hand gesture I have ever seen. "I just thought… you know… you might want to design your new body first."

I blink at her. "Already? It hasn't been a day yet."

It sounds so surreal, when I think of it like that. The simulation crashed at half past noon, and Ironwood had left it by two o' clock, promising he would 'do something' about Polendina. Four real and twelve subjective hours then passed in a recuperative haze, as I immersed myself in happy memories, conjured puppies, and old Disney flicks – what ones survived the crash, anyway. Then came the debacle I call a conversation with Schnee, followed by two hours of tense silence in a bullhead on the way to Atlas Academy.

I never thought I would be so eager to re-upload myself into a computer, but between Schnee, wearing a body that wasn't mine, and the tight, oppressive feeling of having to keep most of my programs suppressed just to fit into it, I was just about ready to turn myself off in protest. Schnee could very well carry me the rest of the way to Atlas. Luckily, it hadn't come to that.

The students would definitely have noticed well-respected businesswoman and Special Operatives officer Winter Schnee carrying an underage and unconscious girl into a supply closet, nevermind that it was actually a secret entrance to the Academy's mainframe. As it was, I just cheerily nodded at what few students we did pass in the hallways. No one seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary – Schnee's coat covered the rent metal in the mobile platform surprisingly well – and few students were outside their rooms so late anyway.

What did surprise me was how quickly Penny made her way here, from… wherever it is she lives. Then again, considering she's already wearing her Atlas Academy uniform – the gray looks surprisingly good on her – maybe I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about.

"Up until two-and-a-half years ago, I had to have my body replaced every few months," Penny explains, not seeming at all discomfited at the strange and personal subject matter. Is that just Penny being Penny, or can she only open up like that because I'm an AI too and there is no way to be overheard in a simulation? I can't say. "So, the process for manufacturing specialized gynoid bodies have already had all the kinks worked out. Some of the machines were retrofitted for other things, since it was a waste just to let it all collect dust, but the General's people said they'd have it all back in working order by Friday morning. Unless we design something cuh-razy, your new body should be ready by Monday night!"

I ping my logs- and today's Tuesday, soon-to-be Wednesday. Okay, that's seriously impressive. Atlas' engineers must have it down to a – heh – science, if they can make me a fully-realized, highly specialized gynoid mobile platform in half the time it took my old landlord to replace the heater. "What qualifies as 'crazy,' exactly?"

"Clockwork, mostly." Her words trigger a response from my systems, showing me the schematics of some of the shifting weapons Penny's used back when she wore the [Mk. XIII]. I hadn't even thought of including something like that in the new platform. It's going to be a receptacle for my soul, not a bloody weapon. "Machines with multiple forms are difficult to produce with standard equipment – part and parcel to the whole 'personal customization' thing. I mean, it can be done, it'll just need a few weeks to import all the specialized pieces; it's not the kind of stuff they have lying around. At least, not for non-students to use."

"Fair enough. I'm not so sure I'd want to include something like that, anyway." If someone had asked me yesterday if I wanted to replace my hand with a Samus-style arm cannon, I'd have politely told them to fuck off. The existence of hungry abominations and my doubtlessly-imminent career as a hunter of said abominations tests that reflex a bit, but not quite _that_ much.

When it comes to mobile platforms, I know two things: one, that the circuits need to be nice and loose, and two, that anything that doesn't look, feel, or sound like _Cerise_ will make me freak the fuck out. What I felt in the [Mk. XIII] wasn't quite at the level of dysphoria, but it was still alien and wrong and _other_ and I would be quite happy to never subject myself to it again.

I only just found out that I'm an AI _today._ Maybe one day I'll reach the level of self-assurance and transhumanism needed to wear a body capable of transforming into a lion or a gatling cannon, but by God is that day not today. I'm not the kind of girl who wants to go from zero to sixty right out of the gate. I'll settle for a nice, chill twenty-five, thank-you-very-much.

"Well!" Penny claps her hands together. "Should we get started?"

I smile. "I don't think the ocean is quite the right setting for this kind of discussion, is it?" I flip the page in _Wonderland,_ the sliders and text replaced by a slew of boxes, each depicting a thumbnail drawing of locales from my memory. Those that survived, anyway. I press one, and say, "I think this should be appropriate?"

After the by-now customary flash of white light, the basement laboratory of _Stark Industries_ rises from the ocean all around us. Modern, exposed piping and ductwork line the vaulted ceiling, illuminated by the several dozen lights embedded in the mystery-metal floors and reinforced walls. Off to one side, plexiglass doors barring an endless staircase reflect the soft light, and on the other, a jukebox, a Skyrim enchanting table, and some blinking machines that I think came from Fringe. There… might have been some file corruption during the crash.

I then make a note on my access panel, which transformed from its customary copy of _Alice in Wonderland_ to an iPad, and cede limited control over the simulation to Penny. She can't do much more than make moving holograms, but… still.

Whatever reservations I have towards Ironwood, Schnee, and Atlas, they don't extend to Penny. That might be short-sighted of me, but she's been nothing but kind and, well, I do have that rock-solid proof – or steel-solid, as the case may be. She wore the [Mk. XIII] for several months and it kept very careful logs of that time, and it didn't try to stop me from rifling through them. It's a horrible invasion of privacy, but I couldn't – wouldn't – stop myself and every memory, emotional response, and diary entry makes me more and more sure of my conclusion.

Penny is good. Nice, kind, loyal, caring, trustworthy… just… _good._ I can trust her. I don't know what it says about me that I need this kind of invasive knowledge to trust someone, but it's been that kind of day, I guess.

"This is so cool," she whispers, amazed at the way the world itself seemed to warp at my command. It warms me. I may be poisoned to the simulation, but it's still a fantastic work of technology.

"I figure some three-dimensional holograms would make this whole process a lot easier, yes? Certainly less of a headache." I wave my hand in a cool but utterly meaningless manner, and the diagram of the [Mk. XIII] appears before us like the Death Star in _A New Hope._ "You can do the same thing, so please help me, Penny. I… don't know where to start."

She nods cheerily. "Well – this is good. Maybe start with the [XV], though?" The image stutters, flickers, and warps, replaced by a far more complex model. My eyes immediately go crosseyed. It makes my old Anatomy classes seem like a coloring book. "Hm, or maybe from scratch? I'm sure a Blue like me has different needs. Did you notice anything when you were in the [XIII]?"

The part of me that quailed at the doctor's needle wants to play it down, but the thought of a life spent in the tight confines of Penny's body's circuitry is far more terrifying than a little admission of need. "It was… constricting," I admit. "I had to keep most of my programs suppressed, and the experience was… uncomfortable."

"Hmm…" Penny gnaws at a lip, pulling up and immediately discarding many slight variations of the [XV] before finally giving a grunt of frustration and scrapping the whole thing. She starts fresh with a simple checklist. "How much is 'most?' And will you be growing much, in the future?"

"Eighty-five and twelve hundreths percent of my system was zipped, taking about five and two-thirds percent of the space it would have at full flex, give or take a few thirds," I say almost immediately. The progress logs are ridiculously useful, and I have more than enough space in Atlas Academy's mainframe to do a little compare-and-contrast in. "I'm full grown, though." I think. "If I do need to code a few more programs, I don't think it will take up too much more space."

She murmurs something to herself, low and private. I politely don't check the simulation's logs to see what it was. "And how much of that is memory, and how much is your programming?"

Another query, and my lips purse. "Ninety-two percent are logs, status reports, memory and location files, and random junk from the simulation."

"Yeah… You're going to need to leave most of that behind."

"I…" I mentally sigh. Then I physically sigh, because Penny is the one person I don't want to seem robotic to. "Fine, I can do that. I'd like to keep as much of it as I can, though. How much space can we fit in the body?"

"Lots," she says, adding _circuitry_ to the checklist, then underlining it three times. A pause, and she bolds it, too. I add a smiley face to the end, just to tell her that it's alright. "We have to put it all in your abdomen, though. It'd kinda suck if we put some of it in your limbs or head and when you get it chopped off, your personality went with it!"

I'm not sure what part of that sentence is more disturbing: that Penny views dismemberment and decapitation as an inevitability or that getting a surprise lobotomy can even happen, to an AI. I sorta assumed that if death ever became imminent, I could just hitch a ride on the CCT and worm my way back to Atlas. I'm… a little bit too big for that, though, and not even scifi wifi speed can move all of me that fast, especially remotely.

There's the option of getting a job in the civilian sphere, of course, but I dismiss it out of hand. I don't know how lien converts to USD, but I don't need to – there's this implicit understanding that a fully-functional gynoid body is going to be _expensive._ If I try to become an accountant or something, I don't doubt that all the good will Atlas is giving me will be pulled out from under me. That means money… but it also means protection, both physical and social.

I am the only successful and sane collective-style AI in all of Remnant, a world at eternal war against literal legions of soulless darkness. Not to sound arrogant, but I am a _very_ valuable asset. I don't think Ironwood – or his bosses – will press if I give a hearty 'Fuck no!' to the very idea of working for them, so long as I don't actively hurt them or their interests, but other groups might not be so open-minded.

Cough, White Fang, cough.

Ironically, becoming a secret government operative against the Evil Hordes of Evil is probably my safest bet. For now, at least – I'll keep my options open. But, until the situation changes? I'll take the free robot body, the implied training on how to fight with it, and maybe a ticket to a combat school. If they sent Penny to Atlas Academy, why wouldn't they send me? That's four years of relative safety that I can use to adapt and decide just what the hell I want to do with my life.

"That would be unpleasant, yes," I agree placidly, my clock speed resetting and the simulation's flow of time, previously slow as molasses, snapping back into place with it. "How much of my system do you think we could fit?"

A hardlight pencil materializes and is then absently drummed against Penny's cheek in a slow rhythm. "Maaaybe… twenty percent, leaving a further five open for new logs and developments? You'd have to trim off more of the fat if you wanted to install some real armor plating, though – that much circuitry doesn't leave much room for the other essentials."

…She did _not_ just call me fat.

"I can't give a more accurate assessment until we cover everything else you need, though." She pauses, visibly changing track. "How was the sensor suite, in your opinion?"

"I… didn't notice anything beyond human…?"

She nods. "Yeah, it's not really intuitive. I can't process too much information consciously, so I have most of it running on automatic and pinging me if anything interesting pops up. We could probably shave some of that off – a _lot_ of space in the [XV] is just to process all that data! And the rest of the cranium is for crunching numbers, too, now that I think about it; strategy and tactics, angles, momentum and parabolic arcs, enemy analysis, keeping track of the battlefield, keeping track of my own swords… you already have all of that covered, though, don't you?"

I do, actually. I don't even need to query the system for clarification. I combed through all of that stuff already, the moment I was put up in the Academy, when the reality of my situation – not as an AI, but as a future Huntress – started to sink in. I wanted to know, on a level from one to Jaune, just how likely my getting mauled and-slash-or murderized is. Conclusion? Maybe, like, a six?

Between my clock speed, lack of involuntary reactions, amazing Semblance, built-in graphing calculators, probability analyzers, robotic body, and Atlesian backing, I'm probably better off than anyone bar Penny as far as headstarts go. Money means a hell of a lot.

If that was all there was to it, I'd give myself a one or two and call it done. It's not, though. I have all these amazing tools… but no idea how to use them. I've never thrown a punch in my entire life. My only experience with Aura is in how fantastically it mucked up the simulation. The only thing about the Grimm I know – bar whatever books I try to download over the coming weeks – is that they disintegrate like so much smoke in the wind. I'm clever enough to know that there is a lot more to the Huntsman biz than punching things in the face, and self-aware enough to know that I'm going to be even more clueless than the aforementioned blond when it comes to… a lot of that.

I query the mainframe, and it tells me that the next term starts in six weeks. I then query the [Inference Engine] what the odds of being given an extra year to settle in are, and it returns a gif of Nicolas Cage laughing. I have no idea what that means.

"Pretty much," I agree. "Hey, random question – but what do you think the General intends to have me do, through the next few months?"

She blinks at me. "Isn't it obvious? Initiation is in a month and a half. Speaking of, I have finals the week after next, so I won't be around as much. I could only come over here because my partner Ciel does need to sleep, and I don't, but no one will be doing much of that finals week!"

"I mean… what if I'm not ready?"

"If you're not…?" She shuffles awkwardly. "I… don't think the rest of the Atlesian government will agree to fund you if you're not making progress or bringing in a return on their, ah, investment. I… would not recommend skipping Initiation. School can be tiresome but it can also be quite fun, and none of the missions they give us students are quite as vigorous as the ones they gave me before I signed up."

 _Vigorous._ No, I don't want my missions to be vigorous, either.

"Really, I very much recommend joining the Academy! Please say you will!" She looks almost pleading, and I can see how much it matters to her that I agree. Not just for her own sake, or from one AI to another – but because she truly, honestly thinks that it's for the best. How can I say no to that?

But I don't think I can say yes, either. "I'll join a combat school," I agree, voice low. "I… don't think I should stay in Atlas, though. General Ironwood has been nothing but good to me, but I don't want to spend the next four years living in a school he runs. After what happened… I need some distance, from this government."

Her eyes widen, and I could swear that I see tears start to gather.

"Not from you!" I squeak, and impulsively pull her into a hug. All that talk about having no involuntary reactions? Not quite so true inside a simulation. "You're… you're so kind to me, and… I think… we can be good friends."

Her eyes lower. "Just friends?"

"Best friends?" I try. Her lower lip wobbles. God, it's like kicking a puppy. I whisper, "Sisters?"

Blink and you'll miss it, all the sorrow is gone and Penny is jumping into the air, arms wrapped tight around my shoulders and taking me to the moon with her. "Spectacular!" she cheers. "I've always wanted a sister! We can do sister things, like have bunk beds and complain about our parents! It'll be wonderful!"

"Hooray," I squeak, wondering if this is what asphyxiation feels like. If I actually needed to breathe in the simulation, I would be one dead robolady.

A thought strikes her, and she sets me down, looking me dead in the eye with a serious mien. "But if you're not going to Atlas," she says, looking adorable instead of businesslike, "Then where are you going? I've always liked Beacon the most, myself."

I freeze, and thoughts whirl. I… do not want to go to Beacon. It's not out of a sense of worry about the canon show – even if it weren't a computer-simulated hypothesis disproven by the foremost cyberaethrologist in the world, curse his name, I still wouldn't care about mucking up a future that was on the fast track to hell – but because it would be _awkward as fuck._

If there is any truth to the anime at all, it would be in the character profiles. That's the easiest thing for the [Inference Engine] to get into, after all – divining the future is hard, but guessing at the past is easy when given governmental records and access to social media. I know a lot of really private stuff about people who have not once in their entire lives heard so much as my name. I will feel like the worst kind of voyeuristic stalker that has ever walked the red earth of Remnant.

And I will be expected to work with and risk my life alongside these people _for the rest of my natural life._

I ratchet up my clock speed, pause, then turn down the simulation's speed for that extra oomph. I need some time to think about this.

There are four Huntsman universities in Remnant. I get a ping, and that's wrong, actually: there are nine. Five are small, private affairs, however, and a quick browse through their official sites makes me mark them off anyway. Atlas is going to be pissy about me asking for another school as it is, there's no need to make them lower their standards and send their only Red AI to the equivalent of a community college. So, there are four viable Huntsman universities in Remnant.

Atlas is right out. Again, much respect to the General, but he is the Headmaster here and I do not want to be under his command anymore than I already am. I have a second motivation against it, though: its militarization worries me, especially taken with how tightly meshed it is with the government. The other three schools have a much wider seperation of church and state, so to speak. Their secular nature is a balm to my soul. On the other hand, Penny's here.

Next is Beacon, ran by Ozpin. I know he has some kind of tight relationship with the General, which is both a pro and a con: on the one hand, I want to get away, and on the other, he'll feel more comfortable with me under his friends's purview than under a stranger's. The greatest strike against it is actually Weiss Schnee, awkward stalkerish knowledge aside. Winter Schnee and maybe Papa Schnee know about my nature as a sapient machine, and I worry that _that_ tidbit will make its way to her ears, however accidentally. I would like to keep the whole 'is an AI' thing under wraps for as long as feasibly possible.

That leaves Shade and Haven. All I know about Vacuo is that it's in a desert, and got the worst deal in the Great War. Mistral is, however, more interesting. It is Haven that Cinder infiltrated, and it is Cinder that orchestrated Penny's death in the show.

 _Can that actually happen?_

Polendina says no. I say no. I take one look at the time-slowed girl in front of me and decide to check, just in case.

I have no idea how to hack into Haven's databanks to look at their roster, even less idea how to spy through cameras and find her that way, and less than zero idea how to go about finding out in some other way. Then I remember that she literally went by her real name in the show and decide to run it through Remnant's version of Google. Clearly, my sanest option is to do the ex-girlfriend thing and stalk her social media.

Three subjective seconds later, I have a picture of Cinder Fall eating lasagna in a café in Mistral, cheerily captioned _'Just got accepted to Haven :D.'_ It's dated to three weeks ago.

Maybe this is all going to be a huge misunderstanding, Cinder was made into an antagonist by the [Inference Engine] because there was no one else, and Remnant is about to experience a hundred years of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Maybe.

When my other options are 'nope,' 'nope,' and 'meh?"

Time snaps back into place.

"I was thinking Haven, actually."

* * *

 _Haven has the sexiest uniform. My decision was simple, really._


	3. Cerise Mk I (1-2)

_I actually updated within a week. Look at that._

* * *

 **The Ghost in the Machine**

* * *

 **Ignition (1-2)**

 **Cerise Mk. I**

* * *

" **It's** not going to work."

My mirror image bends like a willow in the wind, allowing the charging Beowolf just enough space to fly past, only for the blade in her hand to open it up snout to tail. It keens, high and long, but not loud enough to cover the stealthy pounce of its comrade; the dark-haired program is easily able to spin around and decapitate the monstrosity, continuing her rotation to gut a third Grimm that saw an opening but failed to capitalize.

This had been going on for – _fourteen minutes, seven seconds –_ a long while. When Penny and I had finally finished the [Cerise Mk. I], I had been ecstatic, but Penny just frowned and suggested a trial run. Like a horror adaptation of Halo's _Firefight,_ I had pulled up my memories of Luigi's Mansion and replaced all of the ghosts with Beowolves from Penny's logs. The incredible success of my freshly-designed mobile platform utterly failed to explain the steadily worsening frown on her usually smiling face.

"It looks like it's working to me," I say, and repress a flinch as a Beowolf's flung torso phases through me at a lazy three miles per hour. When it smacks against the wall and black blood starts oozing across the floor, I still squeak and climb up and onto the banister. "I mean," and I windmill my arms not to keep my balance, but for the sensation – after all, in the simulation, I can walk on walls, on water, and on the very wind, "The [Mk. I] looks like it's doing amazingly well!"

"That's the problem," Penny fails to explain, sounding unusually aggrieved. She follows the platform in lockstep, leaning slightly over, doubtlessly analyzing every quarter turn and wasted movement of my emotionless doppelganger. "It's too effective."

I cock my head. "And that is a problem… how…?"

She doesn't respond for a long moment, just continues to circle my platform with that same hyper-focused glint to her eyes. If I waved a hand in front of her face right now, I don't think she'd even notice, just sidestep me and continue watching. "We, ah…" she bites a lip, coming back to herself with a slow blink, "We made it too specialized, too heavy."

I turn back to the platform, just in time to watch it leap up to a chandelier and pull it down with one hand, only to hurl it down a narrow hallway like a baseball. Cracks spread across the floor where the platform landed. I wince. "Wow, that's kind of noticeable." Raising my voice, I ask, "Is there anything we can do?"

"We can scrap the design, start over."

My gaze snaps to her at the word 'scrap.' "That seems like kind of an overreaction, doesn't it?"

"Not really," she says. "There are only two reasons why a Huntress would weigh so much: either they have a Semblance that multiplies their weight, or they've started enhancing themselves with machinery. We won't be able to mimic the other effects of the first and we have to distance ourselves from robotics as much as we can, to sell the whole 'being Human' thing."

I open my mouth to counter her, but she's _right_ and I'm not about to start an argument out of bull-headed obstinance. I've always considered stubbornness to be one of the greatest flaws a person could have and I'm not about to become a hypocrite just because my first attempt at creating a robotic body was a failure. I ask a question instead. "Why can't we ape a weight-changing Semblance?"

"Simple: all Sembances can be controlled. Not all can be turned off, though most can, but even the most stubborn Semblances can be suppressed or amplified. You won't be able to make it lighter at the drop of a Lien without crazy amounts of Dust, which we won't be able to fit into it anyway. The first time you tell your future team that you have to take the stairs instead of the elevator because of the weight limit, or you fall and break the floor, or you get onto your bed too quickly and break the frame, and they ask _'Why didn't you just turn it down?',_ you're going to have problems."

"And saying _'I'm part robot'_ puts them onto the path of a very awkward discovery. I understand." Considering there are only two AI in the world and neither are known to the public, the odds of someone jumping from 'cyborg' to 'skynet' are miniscule. Then again, _'till death do us part'_ is taken from a famous oath a Huntsman gave to his teammates in this world, not a marriage liturgy; I'm going to be fighting and living and dying alongside my future teammates until that third part actually happens, which means taking every possible precaution to make sure they don't realize I'm less Human than I appear. This is especially important for me, if the [Inference Engine] is right about my likely teammates.

"The [Mk. XIV] had the same problem," Penny confides, gaze still on the simulation of the [Mk. I]. "That's why we had to give you the [XIII] when you first woke up; getting the [XIV] up to the Doctor's ship and then back down to HQ again would've been next to impossible, considering it'd break the Bullhead's cargo capacity."

"It's that heavy?" I still remember that scene from one of the older _Fantastic Four_ movies, where The Thing had to walk out of the elevator. If that happened to me… I would feel so humiliated, blown masquerade aside.

"Well… no. Most elevators in Atlas can handle twenty-two hundred pounds, and the Bullhead can handle three thousand, but a single-piece load can't weight more than a quarter of that." That's five hundred fifty for an elevator, or seven hundred fifty for the Bullhead. How much does the [Mk. XIV] _weigh?_ "Maybe, if our being AI ever comes out, we can make our bodies' as heavy as we want – but, until then? I think we should design something a bit more, ah, circumspect."

I sigh. So much wasted effort… "How much of the [Mk. I] can we pass on to the [Mk. II], do you think?"

"The framework is fine." She taps her cheek in thought, wandering back over towards me. "Giving the body layers like a tree was a good idea. I don't think it'd work that well for me, considering, but I don't see why we can't pass that along to the [Mk. II]. It's the surface layer that's the most problematic, though. Proper armoring is kinda necessary but I'd guess that it comprises about three-quarters of the weight. Even taken by itself… it's just too heavy."

Assuming the [Mk I] weighs the bare minimum allowed on the Bullhead, seven hundred fifty pounds, then seventy-five percent of that will be five hundred sixty two and a half pounds. Considering all the circuitry, sensor nodes, and other goodies on the inside are what's actually important, that is _way_ too much. I don't like the idea of cutting back on defense any more than outing myself as an AI, though.

"I used to be taller, y'know?" Penny continues. "The [Mk. XV] is four hundred thirty pounds, and you have no idea how many hugs I have to dodge, so the other person doesn't start wondering why they couldn't pick me up." She pauses. "I don't want to cut back on armoring either, though, so I made myself six inches shorter. That way, I can be almost as protected without needing quite so much metal. I'm a Blue, though; I don't need any circuitry outside my core and my cranium. I don't know if that'll work for you."

"…I see." I cup my cheek and start pacing back and forth, voice falling to a low murmur. "Problem: the platform is too heavy. The weight comes from the surface layer, the armoring, not counting the pseudo-skin. The armor gives me incredible defense but weakens my mobility. I need the armoring to survive combat." I pause. "Or, do I? What if I've been looking at all of this the wrong way?"

If two decades playing video games has taught me anything, then there are four ways to survive an enemy's attack. The first is to have an even more overwhelming attack, to defeat the other guy before he can so much as raise his sword. The second is to be quick enough to dodge, because their strength means nothing when none of their strikes connect. The third is to be the tankiest tank that ever tanked, to shrug off their blows no matter how heavy they are. And the fourth is to scorn melee and stay on the other side of the battlefield, dropping the enemy with ranged attacks before they can close the distance.

I'm not dumb, so I'm going to need to pick two for the redundancy. Being the younger AI, for all that I've lived more subjective years, I hadn't spared a second thought before deciding to follow in Penny's tried-and-true method of 'impenetrable defense, overwhelming offense.' It's as she said, though: I'm a different kind of AI, with different talents and needs.

Penny's entire being is interwoven throughout her core, a dense ball of futuristic machinery embedded in her body where a Human's heart would be. That's all she needs to survive, all she needs to exist. To perceive the world, she needs cameras, microphones, and sensor pads, and to make sense of those, she needs specialied machinery in her cranium. She doesn't need anything else, so she filled the rest of her space with fancy calculators and enough heavy metals to draw a lightning bolt. Considering armoring isn't very useful at range and through its very existence ensured she'll never be fast enough to qualify as a DEX build, she focused on pure, overwhelming offense, and never changed because it worked.

I'm different, though. I'm a collective mass of self-aware programs, more intelligent the more of me there are in a given system. I need a _lot_ of space for circuitry, far more than Penny does, but I also have thousands of innate abilities that my sister just can't mimic, and the power to code new ones in response to any given situation. What I need isn't power or defense: it's adaptability.

 _Speed and range, then,_ I decide. With [Bullet Time], I can ratchet up my clock speed, but that won't be of much use in combat if my body is too slow to keep pace with my quickened mind. What I'll need is a lot of sensors, to maintain information advantage, a light body, a ranged weapon, and some way to increase my acceleration. Top speed isn't a concern – to go from zero to sixty, so to speak, _is._

That's not to say I'll go entirely without defense or burst damage, of course, because that'd just be silly. I'll need some armoring for worst-case scenarios, a close-quarters holdout weapon in case keeping at range isn't working, and maybe a rod of Dust to trigger an explosion with if shit really hits the fan. All of that can be worked out later – what's most important is some way to out-accelerate any opponents, be they Huntsmen or Grimm, so my lack of armoring doesn't prove to be a fatal weakness.

"Penny," I ask, and cut the stress test of the [Mk. I] short with a thought, leaving just two schoolgirls in an abandoned manor, "Would forgoing most of the armor and increasing my quickness be a viable alternative? _Is_ there a way to make myself noticeably faster?"

She teethes on her lip in thought. "…Maybe," she says, a long moment later. "We could probably work a more complex engine into your torso, if we forgo everything else in the area. Some tweaks to your gums, replace your faux-saliva bladder with a powerful acid, line your throat with an anti-corrosive film so it doesn't leak out, and you could fuel it by eating crystal Dust. It'll allow you to put more force behind the pistons in your arms and legs." She dances her fingers along the banister. "Oh! And, since Aura enhancement is multiplicative, you'll be able to eke out that much more acceleration."

Penny had always seemed kind of… dim, in the show. Not stupid – but definitely flighty and naïve. Looking at her now, I have to wonder how I ever thought an AI raised by scientists and military commanders could ever be clueless about engineering. I'm sure she doesn't speak so confidently and in depth to most people, even those she likes – but there's something about absolute solitude with the only other of your kind that really allows you to let down your masks.

"Speaking of, my teammate uses Dust to teleport, but that's because of a weird interaction with his Semblance. I'm sure, with some finagling, we might be able to figure out a trick with yours. …What _is_ yours? …If, if you don't mind me asking."

"Deduction," I say, seeing no reason to hide it. The General knows, and the asshole Doctor knows, and now Penny, but no one else; and I think I'll keep it that way. "I input data – facts, memories, observations, whatever – and it outputs conclusions."

"That…" She blinks, eyes glazing over. "I… think you should focus on Dust, then. Maybe fill a staff with it and use it as a weapon; that's what my teammate does. If you're asking for ways to avoid getting hit, then even if you can't figure out how to quicken yourself or teleport – which, with your Semblance, is only a matter of time and experimentation – then you can still control the battlefield, give yourself some breathing room that way."

"What kinds of Dust, do you think?" An idea strikes me, and I cock my head, humming lowly. "If… I mean, if I'm going to be eating Dust to fuel the engine anyway, then maybe we could expand my stomach and use _that_ as a Dust repository. I can eat all kinds of Dust, and won't have to worry about carrying it around – it'll be inside me for as long as I need it. I can cast Nature's Wrath directly from the stomach."

Penny hops onto the banister, sitting sidesaddle right next to me. "That… maybe… sounds possible? I haven't experimented much with Dust myself, so I couldn't say. My reflex is to say 'no' because everyone who's tried has gotten really, really sick, but that's because a mystical energy propellant doesn't play nice with Human bodily functions, and we don't really have that problem, do we? I say… go for it!"

"Good to hear." I smile, because progress is progress even if most of last night's work needs to be scrapped. Besides, I've always preferred wizards and clerics to fighters, anyway.

"I'm not familiar with any Wrath techniques myself, but I know that Winter thins the air around herself so she doesn't need to bother with wind resistance, and I heard a rumor somewhere that Miss Goodwitch telekinetically lifts herself when just running isn't enough, though of course that's a Semblance thing. Dust is triggered by Aura, and everyone's Aura is different, even when Semblances aren't taken into account; what works for someone else might not work for you, but by the same token you're bound to figure something out that does, you know?"

"Yeah, I think I do. There's Dust that can generate kinetic force, right?" I ping Atlas instead of waiting for an answer, and nod in acceptance. Gray Dust, or Pulse Dust, it's called – the cheapest, most worthless of all Dust types, lacking any element at all. "Maybe I can eat a lot of that, and trigger it for bursts of speed. Take advantage of the Third Law of Motion. Might take some tinkering, but I'm sure we can manage something."

"That- might work?" A moment's pause, and, "How will you explain it away?"

"Aah… I can pretend it's my Semblance; I'll be able to choose when to activate it, after all. And… I can extend that to other Dust types, as well. I can eat however many crystals as I want in public, and whenever someone asks I can say that my Semblance allows me to dissolve Dust into my Aura and store it that way."

Slowly, she starts nodding. "Yes, maybe. I never thought about blaming AI stuff on a Semblance, but mine is exactly what I've always claimed it was: polarity. No one has _two_ Semblances, so the first time I lifted my swords in an electromagnetic field, I kinda typecast myself."

"Your Semblance is polarity?" I blink at her. From the show, I know that that's Pyrrha's trick – but I could just barely make out strings connecting Penny to her swords, and with the whole Pinocchio thing I thought it was either Dust or some form of technology.

"Well, yes." She shrugs absently. "I have amazing control, but no range. What I do is connect my swords to my frame with wire, then run current through it, _then_ form a field to lift my blades. It took me a long time to figure that out, let me tell you."

 _Even when their Semblance is technically the same thing, it still expresses itself in massively different ways, then,_ I think. Penny needs direct contact to channel her Semblance, but it lets her wield her half-dozen blades like individual limbs; Pyrrha, by contrast, seemingly has no limit on range, but can only push and pull in a single direction. I remember it first being somewhat-poetically described as the 'manifestation of the soul,' but I suppose there really is something to that.

"Speaking of weapons…" Before I can continue my thought, Penny noticeably twitches, and gazes off into the middle ground. "Penny?"

"My alarm just went off," she explains, smiling sheepishly. "Ciel always wakes up at five o' clock, and it's four thirty. I need to get back to the dorm. Is it okay if we work on it tonight?"

"That's fine." I smile at her. We may have spent half our time swapping movies – I still feel faintly ashamed at myself for deciding to show her the Star Wars prequels before the original trilogy – but I still asked her to donate her night to me. I… don't know where I'd be, if she hadn't been so helpful. I'd probably have to use a copy of the [Mk. XIII] with the armoring torn out and haphazardly replaced with circuitry. I shudder at the thought.

"See you tonight, then!" she cheers, pauses, then jumps forward and tackles me against the banister. I reel back in surprise, and barely have enough time to accept the hug before she smiles into my neck and mutters something.

Then, she vanishes in that familiar haze of nonreality, and I'm left alone in a half-destroyed haunted house. Still, I can't help but smile.

Maybe I should give myself bright green eyes?

* * *

 **I'm** given administrative access to Atlas Academy with that same cheerful, electronic _ping_ I've grown so used to.

It comes with an attached binary file, which [1s & 0s 101] translates as a long string of passwords to more than a dozen private programs, my very own staff account under the name Professor Cerise, and a single note: _"I'd like to talk to you."_

For my twenty-four hour anniversary to being released from my own private Matrix, it's a hell of a present. Naturally, I immediately use it to filter the names Cinder Fall, Emerald Sustrai, and Mercury Black. I get a single response, and from the complete student admission list of Haven at that.

 _Why does Atlas have this kind of access?_ I was no attorney, but that has to be all kinds of illegal. Information security is one of a school's highest priorities, especially when 'Murdering Eldritch Abominations 101' is on every student's schedule, and they all have magic powers to boot. Haven should keep this kind of knowledge on an isolated, secure server- and my scan comes back, telling me that they do. Someone from Atlas must have physically went to Haven, found their database, copied all of the information down, then came back and uploaded it. And, considering the date, must have done this within the past week.

Wow. I'd say something, but I don't actually care and this is really, really good for me. I download all three dossiers on my maybe future teammates and then another on Initiation just to be thorough, all while giggling quietly to myself.

I then open them up and am immediately disappointed. Their information is sparse, no more than the essentials, and as respectful towards their future students' privacy as can be reasonably expected of a magic warrior academy. That such a thing actually annoys me makes me feel guilty for all of a second. It doesn't stop me from reading them, of course.

All three were first put on Haven's radar when they signed up for the Trial Exams, which is where wannabe Huntsmen who couldn't get an invite from an alumnus or didn't graduate from Sanctum go to secure themselves a place for the real entrance exams, Initiation. After they showcased just enough basic skills to stand out from the herd – aura enhancement, martial arts, and specialized weaponry, but no Semblances or Nature's Wrath – they were given an invite and had the bare minimum of a background check performed.

Cinder Fall was supposedly raised in one of the outer villages away from the Kingdoms, before she and a dozen other refugees made their way to Vale after the Grimm destroyed their home. She was fifteen at the time, too old for admittance to Signal, but had enough skill to qualify for a free pass into some local dojos run by retired Huntsmen and was told to try for Beacon in two years. However, she was too poor to afford housing by herself and chose to move to Mistral, where the cost of living is cheaper, instead of going into the foster system. She passed the Trial Exams with her keen sense of tactics and excellent marksmanship.

Emerald Sustrai is a bit more interesting. Wanted for an impressive number of misdemeanors by the time she hit thirteen, she was finally caught and spent the following two years in Mistral's juvenile hall. When she was finally released, she ditched her assigned foster family inside three hours and went right back to collecting wallets like other girls' do shoes. Six months later, she vanished until the Trial Exams, where she paid back all she stole since her release and told the examiners that she had been taken in by an older, retired Huntress who taught her not only combat and Aura, but also restraint and ethics. She passed the Exams by the skin of her teeth, combining natural stealth with an obscure style of combat that caught her opponents, or so the report says, 'in a moment of vulnerability.'

It's a lot tamer than Mercury Black's file, which opens with a link to a list of the many, many assorted crimes of his father, Marcus Black. Marcus had been a well-respected, up-and-coming Huntsman until the Faunus Rights' Revolution, where he responded to Humanity's loss with a horrifying terror campaign that saw him assigned thirteen consecutive life sentences in a maximum security prison. Naturally, he fled capture and eventually fell off the map, showing up only occasionally to assassinate public figures for money. Mercury himself was only first seen during the Exams, where he explained that his father had finally overdosed and he would like to become a Huntsman to purge Marcus' sins on the family name. He then proved his claim by being an unstoppable juggernaut with the capoeira-esque fighting style his father was so infamous for.

All in all, while interesting it's nothing I couldn't have figured out myself, and nothing that disproves the simulation. I'll have to look deeper for that, and I just don't have that kind of access, yet. Worst case scenario, they're all terrorists and I'll be able to prove it before they start killing people and breaking cities. Best case, they're all honest people wanting to make the most of their lackluster pasts, and if we even do get grouped together I'll still have a team I can count on and eventually call family. Either way… Haven is still my goal.

Now, I just need to convince General Ironwood of that.

* * *

" **Absolutely** not," the General says, gently setting his coffee mug down with a clink that nevertheless sounded like the clamor of a judge's gavel. "Atlas may have not been the most welcoming of homes, but it is yours and I will not see you abandoning it; not now, not ever."

 _Is it really abandonment if I was never loyal to Atlas in the first place?_

Of course, saying that would be horribly impolitic. And, well, dumb.

"I would never abandon my homeland," I lie instead, my transmitted voice purposefully given a flat, robotic tenor. I rather sound like a younger, more feminine GLaDOS, actually, which was my intention. The image I projected onto his screen is also mechanically rendered, so I could pace back and forth in the simulation while portraying a visage of calm, collected thought, reclining on a high-backed chair. "When I graduate, I will happily return to Atlas and become a Specialist. This is not a permanent thing. I merely feel that staying in this nation will not be conducive towards proper growth."

"And what is your reasoning for such a bold declaration?"

 _A simulation within a simulation proclaimed the end of the world. With all my life choices invalidated and made unreal, I want the right to choose, however weak my logic. My entire being had been driven towards a purpose, which was revealed to be a lie – and I want a new one. And… I blame you for Polendina's atrocities, however unfairly._

I couldn't say that, of course. That would be even more impolitic, even dumber. And… I wouldn't, not after how kind he was the day the sun died, not after he'd financed the construction of a new body, of a new life, after he'd given me everything. Speaking entirely honestly, he didn't deserve any of this – but neither did I, and I _need_ this, far more than he needs me at Atlas.

"Atlas is my home, but it also hurt me irreperably, however accidentally. I… do not feel comfortable here." I allow a hint of vulnerability to seep into my voice, into my avatar. "I apologize, General, but I am incapable of forgetting that Achilles Laboratories was financed by Atlas, that my creation and near-termination was financed by Atlas. I do not hold it against you or this country, and I will fight for you, one day, but… I can't be here. Not right now. I feel- trapped, caged. Even if it is just the product of a paranoid mind, I look through the cameras in Atlas Academy and around every corner, every pillar, I expect to see Polendina, or his coterie, or faceless military commanders who look at me and see only a weapon. I-"

The General raises a hand, and I stop, stilling in the privacy of the simulation. Did I overstep? I don't mean to play the guilt card, but I did play the responsibility card, and rather heavily at that – but does his responsibility to Atlas outweigh his responsibility as a good human being? I don't think it does. If I'm wrong, though, then I can kiss my dreams of going to Haven goodbye.

But if I'm right…

"I understand," he says, and I can feel my system uncoil in relieved joy. Then he continues and I tighten up again like so many serpents, as he says, "But my fellow commanders will not. I lead the Artifice Projects, and of Atlas' leadership, only I have internalized AI as being just as deserving of rights and the search for self-actualization as a Human being. They will see your desire to seek tutelage in Mistral as an attempt to slip your leash, to fail to make a return on their investment." He pauses. "I ask that you don't think poorly of them, for this – all they see of you and Penny are budget lists and combat capabilities. It is wrong, but it is also the way of things, I'm afraid."

I think for a long moment, a moment that stretches for several seconds in the privacy of my synthesized mind. "…How do I earn their acceptance, then, General?" I ask. "What can I do to make them think that my enrollment in Haven is not just something that they can live with, but something that they actually want? And- within the six weeks between now and Initiation?"

"A feat of strength," he says immediately, drumming his fingers on the desk in a manner eerily reminiscent of Penny. "Not just martial, but also cultural. What you need to do is make being an Atlesian going to a Mistralian school a _good thing_ for this nation, and the only way you can accomplish that is by becoming a public sign of Atlesian superiority. When you enroll in Haven, you need to succeed, you need to stand head-and-shoulders above the Mistralians, all while wearing the symbol of Atlas – the Clockwork Spear – on your back. But, first: you need to convince my comrades that you are capable of doing just such a thing."

"And how, exactly, am I supposed to manage that?"

"The Mistral Regional Tournament." He draws his handgun and immediately begins to dismantle it, the action seeming almost subconscious, even meditative. His eyes sharpen. "If we claim your mother is Mistralian, then we can swing you an invite. It begins in three weeks and ends five days before Haven's Initiation. If you win – you, an AI, not even two years old and with only three weeks of Huntress training – I can guarantee that the rest of Atlas' leadership will not only allow your enrollment in Haven, but will bankroll whatever you need to succeed to the best of your ability."

My avatar's head lowers demurely, and my voice comes out smooth. "If I win," I say, tone deliberately bland, "With only three weeks of training. That would surely be very impressive. Almost unbelievable. In fact, I don't think I'm capable of believing it." A pause. _"I'm not going to win._ Skilled Huntsmen have trained all their lives to win it. Gynoid body or no, there is no conceivable way I will be capable of bringing home the gold from such a monolithic tournament after only _three weeks."_

"Not with that attitude, you won't," he says, every inch the military commander. "The Regional Tournament is split into three brackets: Sanctum students, Haven students, and Haven alumni. You will be fighting in the youngest bracket. I'm not asking you to defeat career Huntsmen, here. I'm not asking you to do anything at all. All I'm doing is offering you a choice: you can enroll in Atlas Academy, all expenses paid, or you can prove to this nation that you are worth more in Haven than here. Now. Are you going to do it, or am I going to scrub this conversation from the camera feed and see you in class next month?"

Dark hair covers my eyes. "You ensure that I'm fighting in Mistral when the Tournament starts. I'll ensure that Atlas wins it."

"Good." His voice is clear, but doesn't sound any more satisfied than my own. "When your platform is completed, report to Suite 1201 for instruction.

"Dismissed."

* * *

 **When** Winter logs into the simulation, I'm just about done researching Doctor Polendina.

Up until around a decade ago, he was the leading expert in the field of cyberaethrology, which is, as he so happily informed me yesterday, the cross-field study of robotics and Aura. Well, not quite. That'd be roboaethrology. It gets folded quite often into cyberaethrology, which is more specifically the cross-field study of _programming_ and Aura. I make this distinction, because up until a decade ago, Doctor Polendina prefaced each of his scholarly articles with a twelve-page rant about how everyone but him gets it mixed up, and how they really need to respect him and his work more, because he's the future and everyone else are posers yadda yadda egotism egotism. Doctor Polendina doesn't have a lot of friends.

What he does have, however, is what I call Leo DiCaprio disorder. By this, I mean that he was nominated a bunch of times for awards but never actually won any, despite being totally deserving. I may not like the guy, but I can't deny that the Doctor is good at what he does. Graduating with a 4.0 GPA at the top engineering school in Atlas, he had more published articles than some of his younger teachers, and he was expected by famous researchers all across the world to become The Next Big Thing. Then, of course, he tried to mix his mechanical skills with Aura and spent the next fifteen years becoming the laughingstock of the scientific community, accomplishing nothing and dragging not only his name but the name of his entire scientific field and all his colleagues through the mud.

When Atlas reached out to him with a spot in Achilles Laboratories, where all the classified and interesting work in science gets down, he must have been ecstatic. Near-unlimited funding, brilliant colleagues, all his basic needs taken care of, respect… it's really no wonder that he mellowed out through the next decade, to the point where he could happily give me the 'wrong' definition of cyberaethrology, a little in-joke he didn't expect me to get. I even understand why he would be so unthinkingly cruel, to me.

He doesn't think I'm a person.

General Ironwood does, Winter Schnee does, Penny does, but that's because I have Aura, the light of the soul, and because they were raised to believe that anyone who has an Aura is a person and anyone who doesn't is either not real or a Creature of Grimm. It makes sense, that they'd think that way. The trees and the beasts and the birds in the sky, and the people, all the people whether they be Human or Faunus, they all have Aura – the only things that don't are stone, wind or Grimm. Aura good, no Aura bad. It's a simple dichotomy that the entire world believes in.

Except for the scientists in the field of aethrology, of course. Doctor Polendina and his colleagues especially. And how couldn't they? They learned how to induce Aura in a simple machine, and of all the Blues only Penny gained full awareness. Then they learned how to induce Aura in a program, and every last one went batshit insane, until I came along. And, if all trees and animals have Aura – and if everyone still makes chairs and houses out of wood and eats steak on Friday nights – then certainly having Aura isn't a sign of actually fucking mattering. It's just an energy source that people use, and that the ignorant hail as some kind of religious miracle.

After a decade of trying and failing to elevate a program into a person, when he finally succeeded, I'm not surprised that he couldn't realize it, that he'd look at me and see just another strand of code. I still remember Penny saying that she's not a real girl, in the simulation. I've only known her a day and I've already seen shades of that belief in the way she talks, in the way she so flippantly speaks of being dismembered and decapitated. If it weren't for my twenty years in the simulation, if I were raised by Polendina, maybe I'd come to believe the same, too. The thought sickens me, but it's there and the only thing I can do about it is try to become as mentally balanced and humane a person as I can be. I was planning on doing that anyway, but I'll double down on it out of sheer, hateful spite if nothing else.

 _Fuck_ calling him Doctor. That's a sign of respect, and I have none for him. Understanding breeds empathy, but in this case it only spawns disgust. The thought of that man having system access to my mind horrifies and enrages me in equal measure. I'm going to do something about that, one day. I don't know what, but I swear to everything worth swearing to that I will.

Naturally, that's when Winter appears. I halve my fear and anger capacity immediately, and twist the simulation away from the hellscape my thoughts made it into and back into the Stark Industries copy a moment later. Several seconds in [Bullet Time] allow me to reach… not zen, but something approaching calm. Schnee doesn't deserve my malice. I still have her coat, layered on top of the [Mk. XIII] like a funeral shroud in a supply closet next to Atlas' mainframe. In a world where I only know four people – her, a cheery AI, the monster who made me, and the General who financed him, however unwittingly – I'll take whatever allies I can get.

"This from your memories?" she asks, not bothering to say 'hello.' Her tone isn't unkind, however, and she didn't use the phrase 'the simulation,' immediately winning her brownie points. That, and there's open curiosity in her ice-blue gaze. Taken with her new hairstyle – she let her beautiful white locks down, and they flow all the way down her back – and she makes a much warmer picture than she had on the airship.

I just nod. "Something like that." I… haven't had the courage to bring up any _actual_ memories, merely locations from fiction and media. Maybe I can face my own apartment again, one day. Then again, maybe not. "It's called 'Stark Industries.' All the most cutting-edge technology was designed here." She doesn't have to know that it's not real, though. It's not like the simulation outside the cinema was any more real.

"Interesting. You'll have to show me more." Her gaze returns to me, and sharpens, becoming more harsh – or, maybe, just focused. "Later, though. We have work to do. I hear you will be fighting in the Mistralian Regional, three weeks hence."

 _Hence? Who even uses that word?_ "I will, yes," I answer, for all that her words weren't given the tell-tale inflection of a question. "I assume that you are my tutor, Miss Schnee. I thank you for your time. I wasn't expecting you until next Tuesday, Monday night at the earliest, however?"

She ignores me with trivial ease. "An hour past, General Ironwood gave me a mission. I don't _like_ turning missions down, but I will if I feel my time is being misplaced. Are we clear?"

"Yes, ma'am," I say, and have to refrain from lifting an eyebrow in mock question. I have involuntary reactions in the simulation, and for all that I was loving that just this morning I think it's going to be a liability, here. Is there a way to turn that down…? [Heart Grow Fonder] pings back, and a quick scan of its files explains that it emulates a mobile platform's lack of unconscious movements. Perfect.

"Good." She pauses, then deigns to answer my earlier question. "As I said, the Mistralian Regional is in three weeks. That is not nearly enough time to show you the path all must take to become a proper Huntress, let alone advance far enough down it to overtake the many, many Sanctum students and nascent graduates you will be facing. Even if it was, you would still be nothing more than an annoyance to Pyrrha Nikos, who can face any two Haven freshman and win. Shorting that time to a mere two weeks, because of something as trite as your body not currently being in existence? That turns the 'impossible' into 'mythical.' No, if we begin at all we will begin now."

If my confidence wasn't already dead, that would have killed it. The bit at the end, though… "Pardon. If?"

"Yes. If." She smiles thinly. "As I said. I don't _like_ turning missions down, but I will if I feel my time is being misplaced. This quest of yours is a fool's errand and I will have no part of it. If you cannot convince me that not only can you accomplish this impossible task, but that it is a task worth accomplishing, then I will leave and never trouble your mainframe again. Am I understood?"

 _What's she getting at here?_ I don't need to query the [Inference Engine] to figure that one out. She's testing me. If she truly believed I couldn't do this, then she wouldn't be here at all – she would've turned General Ironwood down and left, going back to doing Schnee things like stealing ice cream from small children or stalking misbehaving students through the hallways in her fashionable Faunus-hide boots, or whatever. She is prepared to teach me, if I can convince her that I'm worth it, but she's prepared to walk away too, if I'm not. That's what the third degree treatment is for – she's pushing me down, to see if I roll over or if I get up and promise to fight.

The question becomes: how do I respond? If I were another person, it would be with fire and fury, demanding she swallow her words because Cerise doesn't go quietly into the night, because I will not back down, no matter the threat. I'm not that kind of person, however. I'm the kind of person who prefers a smaller, more quiet approach. I ping the [Inference Engine], feed it everything I and Atlas Academy knows, and formulate a plan.

"There were no Grimm in the simulation," I say instead of answering. Bait response. "Did you know that?"

Her eyes narrow further. The disdain is audible. "Are you saying that you're driven by… _fear?"_

"No." Her answer was unexpected, accelerate plan. Start obliquely drawing parallels between my wants and her's. "I was driven by a desire – no, a need – for freedom. I will become a Huntress for that alone, Grimm or no Grimm, despite whatever horrid death awaits me."

"Then why? You're acting like a spoilt child!" Anger incited. Bingo. "Atlas has provided everything for you – why are you spitting on that?"

"Because there is no freedom in Atlas, for me." Deepen parallels between Atlas and SDC. "Because of who I am, what I am, Atlas will always see me as a tool to be used for its own gain."

"Mistral will be no different." Or, in her experience, Atlas will be no different.

"I never said it would be." Express understanding. "Even if Mistral chains me down tighter than Atlas ever could, at least they would be chains that I chose. That is enough." A bit dramatic, but Schnee strikes me as a dramatic person. Now, to make sure she doesn't think I tailored my answer to her personal history: "I don't expect you to understand."

She looks away, but relaxes, if only a smidgen. _Success._ "More than you know, Cerise," she murmurs, obviously not intending me to hear. It's _my_ simulation, however, and so I hear everything. "More than you know."

Now, wait for her to come to her decision on her own. Pressing further while she's thinking of Jacques Schnee will only incite aggravation at best, and may even darken her opinion of me at worst.

"I'll teach you."

The moment she says that, I nod in carefully-affected understanding – smiling implies victory, which implies her defeat, which would only damage this relationship – and stop running Aura through my Semblance. Of course, the moment I stop channeling the [Engine], all my cool understanding comes crashing down.

 _What the Hell did I just do?_

I run a diagnostic in numb wonder, and the response is staggering: a full third of my not-inconsiderable Aura reserves are just. Gone. The [Inference Engine] used it all up, analyzing everything I, _and Atlas,_ knows about Winter Schnee, projecting it through the present, and simulating a possible future – _the best_ possible future. For me, anyways. It told me exactly what to say, how to say it, and how to look while saying it, to draw forth the expected responses and lead to the desired outcome. It hiccuped, a few times – implying fear of the Grimm was a misstep – but it caught itself easily enough. The way it so effortlessly and quickly did so… It's incredible. It's awe-inspiring.

It's also scary as fuck. Like, really? I just went full Sherlock there. Not real Sherlock either, but the Robert Downey Jr. kind. Looking through my logs- my entire personality and character changed, between one simulated heartbeat and the next. Before, I was annoyed at her attitude and words, still mildly enraged at Polendina, and starting to genuinely worry that I'd be left in the lurch until the Tournament. After? It was like a lightswitch was flipped, and it all became so _clear._ I hadn't even noticed anything was different until afterwards.

 _Is that what possession feels like?_ A ghost gets all up in your grill, and the next thing you know you're scrawling Helter Skelter on the walls and covered in blood? Christ. If the [Engine] felt shanking Schnee was the proper next step to take, would I have done it? I don't know. God, I don't know.

Note to self: don't do that again.

"Can you cede control over the simulation to me?" Schnee continues.

I hesitate, but nod. I can leave a safeguard that'll log her out and put me back in control if she abuses it, though I don't see why she would, the moment I think _Barnabas the Barmy_ three times in a row. That's assuming I can't wrest control back with AI hax in the first place.

"Good. I'll limit your capabilities to that of the [Mk. XV], for now. I'll run you through some basic exercises to ensure everything is working as planned, then we'll test you against a pack of Beowolves, a line of Atlesian Knights, and myself. That is… assuming the simulation is capable of mimicking such a thing."

"It can," I affirm. "You'll need to use Penny's combat logs, though – she left a copy of the [XV]'s for me to use. Her platform records the combat capabilities of everything she fights, so Atlas' scientists can chew over it later. The simulation's pretty good at taking that info and running with it, but, of course, it's not capable of true creativity, so none of her Huntsmen sparring partners." I pause, then decide to add, "And, the more independent programs you run, the slower the simulation can process all the data. Last night, we got to a point where there were so many Beowolves, Ursai, and in-progress [Mk. I]s running around that the simulation was actually thrice as slow as the real world. That was pretty crazy."

"Interesting," she muses again, and with a smirk she manifests an angry-looking Beowolf, snarling in hateful fury. She chuckles, low and throaty, and another six appear behind it. "Oh, I could get used to this."

I laugh weakly. "I thought you were running me through some basic exercises, first?"

"I changed my mind," she says absently. Then, she cocks her head in thought. "Do you feel pain, Cerise?"

"No, thank God!"

Schnee – Teacher – doesn't leave for hours.

* * *

 _ **A/N:** Penny and Cerise devolve into nerd talk in this chapter, Cinder manages to aggravate Cerise from another continent and through text she didn't even write, Ironwood gives Cerise some much needed tough love, Cerise realizes she's about to become a professional wizard gladiator robolady and has to fight other professional wizard gladiator normalladies, Schnee initiates the Schnee thing, Cerise successfully uses her Semblance, becomes terrified of her Semblance ever being successful again, and now has to escape the hot water her successful usage of Semblance landed her in. Fun._

 _Next chapter: Morrighan probably, [Mk. II] probably, Ciel probably, Penny definitely and maybe some Dust explosions._

 _Do y'all have any ideas for AI body/weapon/aesthetics/new name/[Programs]/scenes/characters I can work in/whatever? Drop a review, if it interests me or makes sense I might work it in. Cheers._


End file.
